GoodGist Inc., a startup helping with corporate skills development and knowledge management automation, this week announced it has raised USD $1 million in funding from several high-profile investors.
According to the World Economic Forum, an estimated 1 billion individuals globally will require upskilling or reskilling by 2030, with failure to meet this demand potentially resulting in an $8.5 trillion hit to the global economy.
GoodGist plans to address these key issues by deploying an advanced AI Curator, leveraging its patent-pending technology designed to personalize learning and research journeys for individuals on-demand to expedite workforce upskilling and reskilling.
The allocation of this funding comes from the investors FortyTwo VC, Cedar Ridge Ventures, DX Partners, and prominent angel investors from leading tech companies such as Microsoft and Amazon.
The new injection of capital will help GoodGist launch their multilingual GoodGist.com platform into global markets including Europe, expand their team to bolster research and development efforts, and enhance product offerings to mitigate skill gaps and information overload effectively, according to a company press release.
Asutosh Upadhyay, co-founder of FortyTwo.VC, one of the main investors in the round, said, “The current L&D systems are designed to address the common denominator and cannot deliver the desired ROI as these models struggle to balance scalability with personalization. GoodGist Inc. aims to challenge this bottleneck.”
Upadhyay added, “Our investment reflects our confidence in the transformative power of AI to reshape enterprise learning and development, and we could not have envisioned a more capable team to lead this endeavor.”
Kirti Reddy, another major investor in the round and the founder and Managing Partner of Cedar Ridge Ventures, said, “The possibilities here are immense – across the whole value chain of L&D and in many different sectors and markets. We are excited to partner with Ruban and the team to execute against this bold vision.”
For his part, Ruban Phukan, a co-founder and CEO of GoodGist, said he hopes that his technology can help bring down the cost of upskilling the global workforce.
“Traditionally, it costs up to $50,000 per finished hour of content for an entire multi-hour course,” said Phukan. “Remarkably, less than 30% of these courses are initiated by learners, and even fewer are completed. This highlights the urgent need for a paradigm shift in corporate skills development pedagogy.”
Phukan said that the company is fortunate to have the backing of investor who “fully support our vision and mission.” He sees the lack of knowledge growth within industry as a potential existential crisis that is confronting the global workforce.
The founders of GoodGist are serial entrepreneurs with several successful exits of technology startups. Their product vision is born from firsthand experience navigating upskilling and knowledge management hurdles in startups and large corporations.