San Francisco (US) and Lugano (Switzerland) – May 14, 2024
Anthropos, a startup with offices in the US and Switzerland, has raised $2.7M in a pre-seed round led by Switzerland-based Founderful. The funding round also saw participation from Eden Ventures, Exor Ventures, Zanichelli Venture, Alessandro Rivetti, and several angel investors across the EU and US. The company aims to revolutionize the way companies help employees evolve their skill sets in line with business needs while improving retention.
Addressing the Skills Gap and Employee Retention Challenges
In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, talent shortage and skills development have emerged as two of the most pressing issues for companies. According to Gartner, businesses are struggling to tackle these challenges effectively. Anthropos’ innovative platform provides a solution by enabling employees to upskill themselves in the age of AI while helping companies map out and verify critical employee skills.
Stefano Bellasio, CEO of Anthropos, emphasizes the importance of addressing these issues: “People want to see a clear path to grow in their organization and learn the exact skills they need to succeed there. At the same time, you can’t run your business without modern skills and a solution to constantly understand what your people can and cannot do. It’s a problem that is intensifying across all industries and it will get even more important as people need to adopt AI and make it part of their daily job.”
Leveraging Experience from Cloud Academy Inc
Anthropos was founded by Stefano Bellasio and Giacomo Marinangeli, who previously built Cloud Academy Inc, a cloud training platform they started in 2013. The duo successfully scaled the business to over $25M in ARR, serving Fortune 500 customers such as Microsoft, Warner Media, and Deloitte. During this journey, they realized that the majority of their enterprise customers were grappling with the same interrelated problems: employee retention and skills development. After exiting the business to the UK’s largest tech training provider, Stefano and Giacomo decided to focus on a completely different space with Anthropos, a solution aimed at helping corporates with their constant challenges to retain and build their skills.
Centralizing Skills, Experiences, and Training Libraries
Anthropos’ platform enables companies to centralize all their skills, employee experiences, and training libraries in a modern, employee-focused platform. With Anthropos, companies can map out dedicated paths for every role within the organization. This empowers employees to upskill themselves in accordance with the roles they aspire to advance in, while companies can continually assess the relevance of skills for each role and verify which employees possess those skills. Anthropos offers a significant improvement over the traditional approach of lengthy, convoluted employee questionnaires to ascertain skill abilities.
Verifying Soft and Technical Skills throughout the Employee Lifecycle
Central to evidencing its approach, Anthropos can verify soft and technical skills at different stages of the employee lifecycle, from hiring to training and progression. The platform boasts an extensive skills taxonomy, currently covering over 60,000 skills and 18,000 job roles. Additionally, the company has developed a new technology called AI Job Simulations, which allows companies to screen candidates at scale by placing them into immersive real-life scenarios with virtual customers, stakeholders, and colleagues. In these simulations, candidates can solve missions that demonstrate their soft and hard skills. Early customers at Anthropos have customized their AI Job Simulations to screen candidates at scale and prepare them for new roles, providing a safe environment for learning from mistakes while interacting with (virtual) customers and other teams.
Building a School for Each Organization
The founders describe Anthropos as the easiest way to build a school for each organization, where employees can learn and evolve with the business at different stages of their employee lifecycle. The platform is designed to act as a network, enabling employees to see the skills their colleagues possess, learn how they acquired them, and identify potential mentors to support their growth.
Since its launch earlier this year, Anthropos has already attracted an initial customer base concentrated in the tech and tech consulting space. These customers are leveraging the platform to stay competitive and retain top talent. They are utilizing Anthropos to rapidly verify the skills of employees migrating to new roles, easily identify the right people with the right skills for specific projects, and screen candidates at scale using the company’s AI Job Simulations.
Empowering Growth and Clear Career Paths
CEO Stefano Bellasio highlights the importance of providing growth opportunities and clear career paths to employees: “It’s a great opportunity for companies. We have seen it first hand, modern generations consider growth and a clear path to learning new skills as the most important aspect of their jobs. It’s more important than your salary or bonuses. If you can’t provide this, you will see employees joining and leaving within months.”
Antonia Albert, Principal at Founderful, shares a similar sentiment: “We believe that every employee wants to grow and evolve, and that lack of career development and advancement is one of the key drivers of employee turnover. Using AI to democratize career paths and skills development is such a great mission. We are convinced that Stefano and Giacomo, after having successfully scaled and sold their previous tech company, are the right founders to give both companies and employees the transparency needed to enable clear career paths and professional as well as personal growth.”
Future Plans and AI Job Simulations
Looking ahead, Anthropos plans to provide companies and employees access to thousands of skill paths and AI Simulations for roles and skills across multiple departments that every organization can customize. The company is also planning to publish its first batch of AI Job Simulations in the coming months.
“Giacomo and I envision Anthropos becoming the solution for companies to manage and develop all their competencies. In a world that will be redesigned by AI in every role, we believe it’s a great opportunity to help everyone transform their careers,” added CEO Stefano Bellasio.
As businesses navigate the challenges of talent acquisition, retention, and skills development in an AI-driven world, Anthropos is poised to become a game-changer. By empowering companies to build future-ready workforces and providing employees with clear paths for growth, Anthropos is set to transform the way organizations adapt to the evolving landscape of work.
