The recruiter who decided
bad learning was the problem
At some point during her four and a half years placing executives at Michael Page, Nellie Wartoft noticed something that couldn't be un-noticed. The professionals she worked with had ambition in abundance. What they lacked was access - to the right mentors, the right frameworks, the right context for where business was actually going. Traditional corporate training wasn't filling the gap. It was widening it.
She didn't write a think piece about it. She built a company instead.
Tigerhall launched in Singapore in 2018 as a social learning platform - a place where ambitious professionals could learn directly from the executives who'd already made the moves they wanted to make. By 2020 it had pivoted to enterprise, landing its first Fortune 500 clients. By 2021, Sequoia Capital was writing checks. By 2024, Tigerhall had reframed itself entirely: not just a learning platform, but a Change Activation Platform - the infrastructure layer that helps organizations not just communicate change, but actually make it stick.
"It is a 21st-century university in our pockets that teaches us actionable ideas that are actually relevant to our lives in today's business landscape."
- Nellie Wartoft on TigerhallThe pivot to change management wasn't arbitrary. Fortune 500 companies spend staggering sums on transformation consultants - then watch adoption rates crater. The problem isn't the strategy. It's the human layer: the communication, the culture, the capacity to keep people aligned through months or years of disruption. Tigerhall addresses exactly that, with AI-powered automation, targeted messaging, embedded workflows, and real-time analytics that tell leaders when resistance is forming before it becomes a crisis.
Clients like AWS, KPMG, HP, and Mondelez aren't using Tigerhall because it's a nice-to-have. They're using it because organizational change, done the old way, fails spectacularly and expensively.
Wartoft's first business wasn't a startup in the conventional sense. At 16, through Sweden's Junior Achievement program, she started a company teaching senior citizens how to use smartphones and navigate social media. It was her first glimpse of what it means to transfer knowledge across a gap - and her first lesson in making complex things accessible to people who weren't born into them.
Before any of that, there was Sweden. A small village. A teenager who kept asking her teachers why they were teaching memorization when she wanted to learn leadership and finance. At 15, she became a Swedish national champion in both skeet shooting and air rifle - a sport requiring the kind of calm, focused discipline that doesn't often appear on the CVs of B2B SaaS founders. At 18, she bought a one-way ticket to Singapore.
The move wasn't impulsive. Singapore in the 2010s was one of the world's great engines of commercial ambition - a city-state where the culture of relentless improvement aligned with everything Wartoft believed about how people should grow. She worked her way into recruiting at Michael Page, rose to lead their Sales & Marketing practice, and quietly began designing the company she would build when the timing was right.
"You must give trust before you can receive it."
- Nellie Wartoft on leadershipThe timing, as it turned out, was 2018. Tigerhall incorporated in Singapore in May of that year, raised a $1.1M seed round by June, and shipped its app to 153 countries by March 2019. The growth arc from there reads like a business school case study in product-market fit: $2M pre-A in 2019, first enterprise client in 2020, $7M Series A from Sequoia Capital and Monk's Hill Ventures in December 2021.
The platform today sits at a meaningful intersection of forces: the post-pandemic urgency around organizational agility, the AI boom making personalization at scale possible, and the growing recognition that change management is a capability gap inside most large organizations. Tigerhall claims 75-90% reduction in manual workload for transformation teams, 87% change adoption rates, and 91% lower external service spend. Those aren't vanity metrics. They're the numbers that keep Fortune 500 procurement teams coming back.
Wartoft now operates from Los Angeles, where Tigerhall is expanding its US footprint with approximately 150 employees across 12 markets. She chairs the Executive Council for Leading Change, hosts "The Only Constant" podcast for transformation executives, speaks at TEDx and the Global CEO Exchange, and sits on the boards of the Swedish Chamber of Commerce Singapore and SGTech's Digital Transformation Chapter.
When she's not navigating the organizational chaos of Fortune 500 transformations, she plays tennis, surfs, and listens to electronic house music. She hires for sense of humor above almost everything else - which tells you something about how she thinks a company should feel from the inside.