Announcing Our Series A: HowNow Raises $5 million To Make Meaningful Learning A Part Of Everyday Work

We’re super excited to share that HowNow has raised a $5 million Series A from Mercia and the world’s leading learning company, Pearson.

Our mission is to make meaningful learning a part of everyday work. Today, we make this a reality for hundreds of thousands of people and with this funding, we’re one step closer to making this a reality for millions more.

We’ve experienced incredible growth since our Seed funding from Fuel Ventures, Thames Trust, LearnStart and several brilliant entrepreneurs, operators and HR tech innovators.

Over the last 24 months, we’ve partnered with over 100 organisations across almost every major industry, with people using HowNow to learn and grow in 150+ countries.

We believe our momentum speaks to how the best companies in the world have made the choice to care about the growth of their people.

Goodbye LMS, can’t say it’s been fun

Despite the staggering $350 billion spent on corporate learning worldwide, lack of growth opportunities is still the top reason why people leave companies.

It could not be more obvious that there is a very expensive Engagement Gap, and the current learning tech stack is largely to blame. Time-poor employees want access to relevant learning in the moments that matter. Instead, they’re getting irrelevant interruptions delivered by an LMS they hate to use.

At HowNow, we’re immensely proud to have built the only learning experience platform (LXP) that connects employees with learning opportunities, skills, and knowledge in the flow of work, all while tracking all your L&D in one place. It’s more than an LMS replacement. It’s a whole new learning experience built from the ground up for the new world of work.

From our Unified Search which offers the fastest way to find any knowledge, to a tailored feed that feeds your curiosity, it’s never been easier for employees to learn what they need to. We’ve eliminated the headache of running learning ops with our easy-to-build workflows that automate tedious administrative tasks.

And with HowNow+, you can meet the learning needs of every team and job role without the hassle of managing multiple providers. We’ve handpicked the best resources from world-class experts and made them available to you in one convenient subscription.

But we didn’t stop there. We continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible with our seamless Slack and MS Teams integrations, allowing learning and knowledge sharing to happen naturally everywhere people work. And our Browser Extension takes search to the next level by automatically suggesting relevant knowledge based on the work you’re doing – without you even having to search.

Our customers are proof that with the right technology, you can build a learning culture where people are highly engaged, with an average monthly engagement rate of nearly 80% compared to the limited engagement of 15% commonly seen with traditional LMSes.

Learning at work just got better

With our funding, we start Act Two of our story. We plan to build on our strong foundation with products that help our customers bring certainty to L&D success in uncertain times.

With the world of work changing at breakneck speed and skills shortages on the rise, it’s more important than ever to build better ways to learn and grow, and we’re committed to rising to that challenge, every single day.

From enabling scalable learning communities and creating knowledge that is immediately relevant with Generative AI, to making it easy to measure impact and connect learning and skills to the overall employee experience – we could not be more excited about what we’re building.

We take pride in our product, but truly what sets us apart is our people. They’re a one-of-a-kind mix of smarts, creativity, passion, kindness, and fun. It’s no wonder people rave about our team just as much as our product.

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We will continue to create a place where HowNowers can do their best work and build a company we can all be proud of (by the way, we’re hiring).

We are forever grateful to our customers, partners, and supporters who took a chance on us, despite the odds stacked against us. You took a leap of faith with us when others may have had their doubts. Thanks for believing we could shake things up and do things differently.

We couldn’t have done it without you.

Nelson Sivalingam,

CEO and Co-founder at HowNow

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