employee-development
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Sponge wants your next training course to earn its place
From Tesco’s compliance lessons to Snap’s AR tutorials, the British learning company sells a demanding idea: corporate education should help people do something, not merely finish something.
Paul Eschen Is Betting Workplace Learning on Practice, Not More Content
The BizLibrary CMO has spent his career learning how attention becomes action. His current argument is pointed: in an age of abundant AI-generated information, the scarce ingredient is a safe place to practice.
The Spreadsheet Was the First Casualty: How Chronus Turned Mentoring Into Enterprise Infrastructure
Chronus took the warmest idea in corporate life - finding a mentor - and gave it matching logic, nudges, dashboards and a budget line. Now it is betting that AI can widen access without flattening the human relationship that made mentoring useful in the first place.
Cornerstone Lost Its First Business - Then Built the Software That Trains 140 Million People
The dot-com crash killed its consumer pitch. Customers designed the replacement, a loan shark covered payroll, and 25 years later Cornerstone is trying to teach HR what comes after the job description.
The ‘Easy Button’ for HR: How BizLibrary Turned 13,000 Courses Into a Training Operating System
HR teams do not need another library card. They need compliance reports, useful courses, fewer spreadsheets, and a human who answers the phone. BizLibrary has spent three decades turning that unglamorous bundle into its product.
Tacala, LLC
Tacala built one Alabama Taco Bell into a 380-plus-store operating system. Its harder trick is making education, hardship relief and local giving work at drive-through scale.
Nestor
Nestor is an AI-powered, skills-based talent management platform - a self-described People Intelligence Platform - that helps HR leaders, managers, and employees map, activate, and deploy the skills inside an organization. Built around a market library of 20,000+ skills and an AI companion, Nestor connects performance management, employee engagement, and career development so companies can spot skill gaps, run an internal talent marketplace, and make workforce decisions based on capability rather than job titles.
Pinnacle - AI Coaching
Pinnacle is a New York-based HR-tech startup building scalable AI coaching that lives inside the tools employees already use. Its AI coach, Pascal, embeds in Slack, Microsoft Teams, and video meetings to give managers and employees personalized, real-time guidance drawn from their actual work context - performance reviews, 360 feedback, company competency frameworks, and day-to-day communication patterns. Founded by former accelerator CEO and executive coach Alexei Dunaway, Pinnacle raised a $2.5M seed round in March 2025 to bring executive-grade coaching to every employee, not just the C-suite.
Sayge
Sayge is a New York-based coaching platform that gives everyday employees - not just executives - ongoing 1:1 access to vetted, ICF-certified professional coaches. Founded in 2017 by Jamie Bryan and Katie Stricker under the banner 'Coaching for the Rest of Us,' the company pairs employees with a personal coach, runs biweekly virtual sessions, and hands employers dashboards that track progress and impact. After raising $1.75M in seed funding, Sayge was acquired by employee-benefits platform Bennie in October 2023 and now operates as part of Bennie's benefits suite.
Alexei Dunaway
Alexei Dunaway is the founder and CEO of Pinnacle, a New York and Palo Alto based startup building Pascal, an AI performance and career coach that lives inside Slack, Teams, and Zoom. A Stanford GSB graduate and Fulbright Scholar, he spent five years building an entrepreneur accelerator in Kenya before running an executive coaching practice for venture-backed founders. He now wants to give every worker the kind of coaching that used to be reserved for the C-suite. Pinnacle raised a $2.5M seed round in March 2025 led by eLab Ventures.