– USA, CA – Sounding Board, Inc, the premier cloud-based coaching platform, announced the close of an oversubscribed $13m Series A funding led by Canaan Partners alongside Correlation Ventures, existing investors Bloomberg Beta, Precursor Ventures, and learning luminaries David Blake (Chairman & founder at Degreed), Kevin Johnson (former CEO at Udemy), Ed Miller (former CEO at NovoEd), and Brett Queener (former President at SmartRecruiters).
Concurrent with the financing, Maha Ibrahim, General Partner at Canaan will join the Sounding Board’s all-female Board of Directors, effective immediately.
“Coaching is at an inflection point – it’s a massive opportunity and the timing is right. Sounding Board is the only company providing leadership development designed to drive business goals, unlike the many companies providing coaching for health and wellness,” said Maha Ibrahim, General Partner at Canaan.
“Coaching broke through in 2020 as the go-to model for personalized leadership development. Demand for digital-first coaching platforms like Sounding Board accelerated as companies scrambled to shift their talent development strategies online,” said CEO and co-founder, Christine Tao. “Sounding Board saw record growth heading into 2021, pointing to the market’s urgent need for virtual solutions that are scalable and cost-effective. Our platform brings a systematic, data-driven approach to a traditionally service-driven industry – with measurable impact on the business.”
Beyond simply delivering coaching virtually, Sounding Board goes to the next level, providing a complete, end-to-end, cloud-based coaching platform that supports a dynamic coaching ecosystem for the enterprise. Sounding Board’s solution allows enterprises to seamlessly manage, scale, and measure coaching on one unified platform. Proprietary AI-Powered tools remove the administrative burden around coach matching, scheduling, and program management to allow coaching to scale broadly. Its clear competitive advantage is a scalable, adaptive approach to leadership development that is personalized to the learning style and cadence of each individual. Clients saw major improvements across key capabilities, including a 173% increase in the ability to successfully interact with others across all functions.*
“Because enterprise growth and innovation is driven by capable leadership, having a strong bench of leaders has become a sustainable competitive advantage. Our clients appreciate that the Sounding Board Coaching Enablement Platform was purpose-built for coaching and solves their unique needs, including actionable data insights across all coaching programs. This is reflected in our key capabilities measurements and high NPS score of 81.” said Co-Founder and Chief Coaching Officer, Lori Mazan.
About Sounding Board
Sounding Board disrupted a decades-long and well-established coaching business model that was costly, and in a domain exclusive to senior executives. Intending to democratize access to coaching globally, Sounding Board was one of the first to market with a virtual 1:1 coaching program that achieved the economics necessary to expand access to leadership coaching throughout an organization with a specific focus on sustainable leadership capabilities that tie directly to business impact. Sounding Board’s best-in-class coach network covers over 60 countries and 15+ languages around the globe.
For more information: https://www.soundingboardinc.com/
About Canaan Partners
Canaan is an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in entrepreneurs with visionary ideas. With $5B under management, a diversified fund, and hundreds of exits to date, we partner with entrepreneurs building the next generation of technology and healthcare companies that will transform how we live, work and thrive.
For more information: https://www.canaan.com/
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