Sounding Board announced a $30 million Series B Round of venture capital for its employee coaching marketplace app. This brings its total raised to $45 million. The round was led by JAZZ Venture Partners.
Coaching marketplaces have received increased attention from employers, tech providers, and investors. Trends that existed pre-COVID have been augmented and driven increased adoption of not just tech, but company policy in this area. A long list of startups continues to raise funds that come with both increased valuations and investor expectations. Market analysts look to a looming stress test of the coaching marketplace model. We’ve recently asked the question:
Can the quality of coaching scale globally as the number of coaches increases, all working across multiple customers? Where do providers pull back from the marketplace and lean in more on technology or empowering coaches “in-house?”
Sounding Board’s answer is to support internal coaches with AI-powered tools and coaching frameworks while also offering an external marketplace of vetted coaches that meet some minimum experience requirements. With the launch of their Coaching Management System™, Sounding Board gives organizations the ability to manage all their coaching engagements in one platform – whether they use Sounding Board leadership coaches, their internal coaches, or a combination.
“Because enterprise growth and innovation are driven by capable leadership, having a strong bench of leaders has become a critical competitive advantage.”
Christine Tao, Sounding Board CEO and Co-founder
According to Lori Mazan, Sounding Board’s co-founder, President & Chief Coaching Officer, their internal research “confirms that the majority of organizations (71%) offer some form of leadership coaching, and most of them (67%) rely on a combination of internal and external coaches.”
Most solutions that we’ve looked at focus on a model offering one of either internal or external coaches. HR buyers selecting coaching partners with an eye on long-term ability to scale and to preserve quality might be well served to add Sounding Board to their lists of providers.
$13.7 billion was invested globally in work tech through Q3 2021 across 299 deals. WorkTech Market Insiders can access insights and analysis of all of the deals in our Q3 report with a free membership.
Source: Sounding Board’s Hypergrowth Accelerates $30M Series
