A company’s greatest asset is its talent but the great tragedy of the workplace is untapped talent. Large multinational organizations have scores of employees but no efficient way to know who specializes in what, which causes significant wastage of money and time. ProFinda puts an end to this by mapping an organisation’s employees’ expertise and skills, allowing companies to properly allocate and match talent to different projects and roles. ProFinda is known as the “LinkedIn on Steroids” because its advanced skills ontology creates a dynamic and searchable record of an organisation’s resources.
London TechWatch sat down with ProFinda CEO Roger Gorman to learn more about the company’s cutting edge technology, the future of workforce optimisation, and the company’s recent funding round.
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
The recent amount was £1M from Nesta. We’ve raised nearly £7M thus far.
Tell us about the product or service ProFinda offers.
ProFinda is pioneering a new B2B category: “workforce optimisation”. We are the first business of our category with multinationals as clients – a huge accolade and reference. This new segment is predicted to be worth nearly US$3B of ARR.
ProFinda maps all skills from around an organisation and uses its proprietary skills ontology, machine learning, and workflow to unlock a suite of critical business use cases: resourcing, bids, M&A, strategic workforce planning etc. This unlocks new utilisation of talent, radically improved performance and talent engagement.
ProFinda ensures the next generation of talent and skills insight to better inform workforce planning, strategy, and organisational development.
What inspired you to start ProFinda?
In my past life, I was working with teams that created and designed large scale change and innovation programs for multinationals. I saw first-hand just how hard it was to find the right people to work on a project, both for our business but also for all of my global clients.
I knew I had tens of thousands of incredibly talented colleagues around the business, I just couldn’t identify which one of them had the right skills for the task in front of me, and there was no tool to help me do this.
Every bid, project, collaboration, ideation would boil down to my network of ‘usual suspects’. Or I would be firing out desperate emails asking if “anyone knew someone who knew X.”
Then when I was part of an M&A, I watched the entire process from a different angle, like a slow-motion car crash. Cultures and teams were not aligned, the wrong people were leaving. It was an unnecessary mess.
It dawned on me that the singular challenge was that we had no vantage point of our skills. Where was the cool system for ‘me’? Something that helped my day job but also helped shape and support my personal development?
I realised if you could nail this employee engagement question, you’d have all the skills data you’d need to equip any task – or identify when you needed to bring in someone from outside.
How is ProFinda different?
I would say we have three areas of differentiation.
Understanding skills first. This is immensely complex but when solved will reinvent peoples careers, company growth and even impact the wider economy.
One of our unique aspects is our advanced skills ontology, which can help vacuum up internal enterprise data and build a powerful and accurate dynamic and searchable record of an organisation’s skills and what they actually mean in relation to someone who is searching for someone to do something quite specific. The same ontology then helps accelerate how people are matched accurately to the right work. It’s part of what we call ‘the science of skills’.
The second unique aspect of ProFinda is working outside the enterprise landscape. As such we can help NGOs, causes, and charities massively improve how they operate. Our platform has been described many times as “LinkedIn on Steroids”. So we can also help professional networks collaborate in a new smart and effective way. Tackling climate action, anti-trafficking, homelessness and refugees etc can all be transformed since many of their challenges/opportunities are the same as enterprises. Namely, the better matching of the right people to the right opportunities. A great example would be crisis response. How quickly and accurately can you connect the experts on the ground to save and change lives?
And finally, on a macro level, it’s our impact on employment. We are helping provide a lens on the skills around economies, where there are gaps, opportunities and challenges that need addressing with training, personal development and education.
What market is ProFinda targeting and how big is it?
It’s a huge new segment. We’re creating a new category in our industry. Conservative thinking indicates its ARR is around $3B.
Our main focus over the next few years is rethinking and helping transform large enterprises. Our role is to transform, for example, a company of 150K staff who only know one another by their job title into a knowledge network of 1.5M. This is possible if the platform can respect the complex roles and permissions for contacting colleagues, and when you include their alumni, freelancers, supply chain, etc.
The problem we solve also exists across mid and large organisations, NGOs, governments, professional networks, alumni, etc. These organisations all have an extremely limited view of their own people and their skills.
What’s your business model?
Our business model depends on the client profile. Typically it’s a monthly license combined with upfront consultancy to deliver the integration and change work.
How has the business changed since we spoke at the time of your last funding in January of 2018?
We’ve won a number of multinational clients and the initial results are extremely exciting. Typically we see the traditional three or four weeks ‘lost’ time spent searching for teams and experts has dropped now to just 3.5 seconds. And the quality of team fit is up 300% too. These are genuinely the first ‘proper’ clients anyone has secured in our new category.
We’re also now launching a number of partnerships in 2020 with some of the biggest consultancy firms to help them with the transformation programs their clients need to undertake.
What was the funding process like?
All our funding milestones have been relatively straightforward because investors see immediately the impact that ProFinda can deliver. With Nesta, the process took about three months end to end.
Nesta’s investment team is extremely impressive. Their CIO, Nathan, has an impressive vision and passion for how strategic investment can create deep system change.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
Time and focus are key challenges as a founder CEO. There is simply an impossible set of compromises to juggle every day during a live fundraising round.
If you’re raising funds because you’re winning clients and need to grow, then fundraising is fun. It’s high energy.
We’ve never had to raise capital because we’re simply running out of cash. It’s a very different dynamic.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
Nesta sees the tremendous impact of our product and our category in the business market, and importantly that we are already winning some of the most influential brands in the world.
They quickly saw the work we’re already doing across climate change with the UN, refugees, the homeless etc, and that we’re at the heart of the thinking around future of work and skills for the new economy.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
We are continuing to hire incredible talent to help us spread the message. We are starting to spread the message about the impact of ProFinda with our clients and beyond. We are continuing to fundraise and we’re currently in a live round still.
We’re growing setting up our US office to respond to excellent demand from businesses in North America.
What advice can you offer companies in London that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
Take advantage of the angel market. If your idea and team are strong, they are out there and are looking to invest the money.
Find smart and ‘good’ money. So, the source of the investment comes from people who can add value and who care about your mission as deeply as you do.
We see a change to an economy where smart capital invests with purpose. Ask yourself: what’s your purpose? Then surround yourself with visionary investors and smash that mission.
We see a change to an economy where smart capital invests with purpose. Ask yourself: what’s your purpose? Then surround yourself with visionary investors and smash that mission.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
We will broaden our customer base and expand the ProFinda team, and alongside accelerate the work we’re doing in the impact scene.
What’s your favorite outdoor activity in London?
My new motorbike is becoming a new passion. Riding through London is amazing. Of course, you need a good day of weather and the right traffic.
