Fuel50 announced a $15.5 million Series B round of venture capital funding for its internal mobility app. This brings its total raised to $36.1 million.
Positioning itself as a “talent marketplace,” the company, from its inception, has been focused on career pathing for existing employees. The shift to talent marketplace opens the dialogue to reskilling and factoring in new talent acquisition along with talent management practices.
Since 2020, Fuel50 has seen 70% year-over-year growth in recurring revenue and grew its customer base by 23%. Companies using Fuel50 to increase their talent retention and recruitment saw an immediate impact upon deployment with increases up to 65% in lateral movement, 35% in internal recruitment, and a reduction of 60% in employee churn.
From Fuel50’s press release
When Amazon announced its upskilling initiative in July of 2019, it cemented internal mobility and career pathing as a trend to be reckoned with for talent-focused HR leaders. While the trend wasn’t new in 2019, Amazon committing $700 million for the reskilling of 100,000 workers, which represent about a third of its US workforce – caught the eye of CEOs everywhere and created a question that the CHRO and CLO needed to have an answer for: ” What’s our plan for reskilling?”
Retaining, motivating, and engaging employees by aligning their needs and skills with the business’s current and future path is an excellent thing. But it’s never been easy. There are owners for recruiting, learning, and leadership development, but you’ll meet a rare few owners of the overall talent management process. The lack of a clear owner is a gaping hole in the market.
The solutions we’ve reviewed, and there have been numerous, address the challenge in one of two ways: as an internal job board/marketplace/portal putting the onus on the employee to find their next role and seek out the path, or by assessing the skills of the workforce and then matching them to a career path. Fuel50 attempts to provide both of these capabilities. It offers AI-driven smart matching, skills gap analysis, mentoring, feedback, internal gigs and opportunities, and analytics.
The investment required to support these initiatives goes beyond dollars. Delivering on the promise of reskilling and internal mobility requires engagement and support from the manager, and ideally, an employee-centric culture. Supportive managers and cultures may be the biggest challenge. Even the Amazon announcement we all took note of only reflects a financial commitment of $7,000 per employee for an initiative spanning until 2025.
In 2020 $1.4 billion was invested globally in HR technology focused on talent management. Get the full report for free on 2020 global HR technology VC here.