We, at Madrona Venture Group, are excited to announce our investment in GO1, a company that is focused on making learning easy. GO1 has been quietly establishing their platform in a LMS (Learning Management System) agnostic way for corporations, educational institutions and continuing education organizations to reach their users with the content they need. When we first met with GO1’s Andrew Barnes, this current COVID-19 crisis was not even a whisper. Now at a roar, we are seeing that not only is GO1’s core business of corporate training strong, but the learning management systems that deliver content from top educational institutions to their students are expanding their usage. And we think they won’t turn back once we are out of this global pandemic.
GO1 delivers an onboarding, compliance, educational and professional development platform for employee and student education and training. By aggregating training content from a broad set of content providers, GO1 redefines how enterprises procure training content and how employees consume it in an on-demand basis via a modern self-service user experience. GO1 also integrates with a variety of key learning management platforms and integrates with front ends such as Microsoft Teams, which has seen incredible growth.
When I first met with Andrew Barnes, CEO and co-founder of GO1, I was a little skeptical about the training/learning market and opportunity. The worldwide training market is massive and estimated at low hundreds of billions of dollars worldwide. At the same time, it is a highly fragmented market. I was transparent with Andrew about my skepticism, and to his credit he took that as a challenge to educate me – and now we are investing. So, it worked!
GO1 is taking a unique approach to this massive opportunity. Rather than being yet another content creator, they have built a platform that aggregates any and all training content, provides an easy-to-consume user experience, and is LMS agnostic. Additionally, they have an easy API and can be integrated into corporate platforms and, as mentioned above, popular collaborative learning environments such as Microsoft Teams.
There are several changes underway in the market that together provide a massive opportunity for a platform like GO1 to fundamentally transform how people learn and train themselves to the ever- changing needs and requirements of the business world.
- Secular trends are driving the need for more training including compliance and regulatory requirements.
- Enterprises view access to world-class training and learning as a core value proposition for their employees – both in terms of increased productivity and satisfaction.
- Consumerization forces drive employees to want access to training that is highly relevant and curated with an easy-to-consume on-demand experience.
GO1’s solution is squarely focused on taking advantage of these trends and delivering a scalable marketplace for corporate training and educational learning content. The access to data that they have about course consumption across users and industries provides a valuable opportunity to provide more curated and targeted content that is highly relevant for their users – driving consumption and satisfaction higher.
GO1 is part of the Madrona Acceleration Fund that we raised last year to invest in great companies and teams that have found product-market fit and are ready to scale to the next level. We are excited that Salesforce Ventures joined us as new investors in this round. With 1.5M+ learners already taking advantage of the GO1 platform, this company has laid a strong foundation for scale.
The world needs all kinds of support right now and we are excited for GO1 to be a company that can provide learning experiences to a broad audience, inspiring minds and inspiring change. We are looking forward to being a valuable partner for Andrew and his team as GO1 continues to build the world’s largest online learning platform.
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