Hone bags $3.6 million in Seed Funding to reimagine workplace training for modern and distributed teams

Hone, a startup that provides all-in-one training platform for modern companies and distributed teams, has secured $3.6 million seed funding round to accelerate its platform expansion, support the company’s rapid growth, and develop additional programs to serve fast-growing small businesses, mid-market and enterprise organizations. The round was led by Cowboy Ventures and Harrison Metal. Other backers include Slack Fund, Reach Capital, Rethink Education, Day One Ventures, Entangled Ventures, CEO of Masterclass David Rogier, CEO of Guild Education Rachel Carlson, Co-Founder of Atrium HQ Pete Kazanjy, and Co-Founder of Grovo Jeff Fernandez.

The outdated corporate training and leadership development industry is sized at over $30 billion annually in the United States.1 Yet research shows, on average, trainees forget 70 percent of what they are taught within 24 hours of a training experience2. As well, teams are more geographically dispersed than ever; work-at-home has grown by 140 percent since 2005, almost 10 times faster than the rest of the workforce, with more than 4.3 million employees working remotely at least half the time.3 Hone is the antidote to current, traditionally expensive, time-consuming workshops and pre-recorded e-learning videos that don’t fit today’s busy schedules or remote workforces, or provide the interaction and feedback necessary to develop critical people skills.

Founded in April 2018 by Jeremy Hamel, Savina Perez, and Tom Griffiths, Hone solves manager and soft-skills training for modern and distributed teams. Hone is the first ever large-scale platform for synchronous, online instructor-led training programs, enabling the spectrum of live corporate training needs in a single solution. With a focus on high-impact topics of leadership, management and people skills, Hone’s interactive, 60-90 minute classes make training just another meeting on your calendar, with continuous support and uniquely measurable impacts on the organization.

“Companies large and small hope to develop modern leaders who work with increasingly distributed and diverse teams. It’s amazing that until now there hasn’t been a modern solution to deliver an interactive, scalable, convenient and measurable training and development platform to help companies develop modern leaders and managers,” said Aileen Lee, founder and managing partner of Cowboy Ventures. “The Hone team’s personal connection with the market need and their skillsets are incredibly suited to deliver a world-class, delightful solution to talent teams and employees around the world.”

Hone serves customers such as WeWork, Clear, App Annie, Dashlane, Omada Health, SoulCycle and others. The company is a member of the PeopleTech Partners network and is advised by top executive coaches, psychologists and practitioners to ensure its training is best-in-class. It has welcomed to its advisory team Josh Bersin, founder of Bersin™ by Deloitte and global industry analyst covering all aspects of the world of work and HR technology.

“As we scaled FanDuel from five founders to over 500 employees across eight time zones there was no complete solution for training our emerging leaders, let alone a way to measure the impact of that training”, said Tom Griffiths, CEO and Co-Founder of Hone, and former Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of FanDuel. “As organizations grow ever more distributed, we were inspired to create Hone to modernize how the world’s best companies develop their current and future leaders. We’re thrilled to have this exceptional set of partners with us on that mission.” Other co-founders with Griffiths include Jeremy Hamel and Savina Perez, previously of CultureIQ, who both bring deep experience in the HR technology space.