Belgian startup Whale, a knowledge and training platform for SMEs, has raised €1 million from Volta Ventures, Peak Capital, and the founding team. The new funding will accelerate Whale’s global expansion and marketing initiatives.
Whale is a SaaS company that helps teams centralize their processes, procedures, policies, and tribal knowledge in one place, so they can onboard and train employees faster. As a web platform and web plugin, Whale empowers teams with bite-size training content, within the context of their work and delivered on time. The company mainly focuses on service companies with knowledge workers and companies that use frameworks such as EOS or Scaling up.
Whale’s co-founder and CEO, Gary Vanbutsele, previously led an IT services firm and knows how time-consuming educating employees the traditional way can get. “Sometimes it felt like all I did was repeat myself over and over again without real progress. I needed to find a more scalable and efficient way to empower my teams with the knowledge they required.”
Koen De Waele, Venture Partner at Volta Ventures, explained his motivation to invest: “The Whale team is razor-focused on driving operational efficiency and effectiveness by delivering knowledge in the flow of work. As such, Whale drives digital transformation globally through process operationalization and speeds up onboarding, on-the-job training, and best-practices sharing.”
Stefan Bary, Managing Partner at Peak Capital, added: “Traditional learning and knowledge management solutions store information in siloed applications, which means adoption by employees is often poor. However, the solution of Whale provides context-aware knowledge within the tools a company uses: the right information for the right employee at the right time. Truly learning while doing in a very efficient way.”
With the funding, Whale will further improve their product and ramp-up their international sales and marketing efforts. Gary commented: “We are very excited to bring not one, but two experienced partners onboard that will empower us in our mission to help companies train and work more effectively.”
