Trainual, a Scottsdale-based startup that helps companies onboard and train new employees, has raised $27 million in Series B funding after a year of growth and expansion.
The company, which helps digitize and centralize all aspects of its customers' in-house operations, saw massive growth during the pandemic as companies sought a way to shift hiring and training materials into a virtual-first format.
When asked how he feels at this milestone, Trainual’s CEO and founder Chris Ronzio gave an answer typical of a hardworking entrepreneur: He’s just ready to get back to work.
“I feel ... already sick of celebrating,” he said with a chuckle. “You want to toast to the milestone and reflect and be grateful and thank the team. But we’re already moving, we’re already on to the next events we’re planning and the projects we’re doing and the people we’re hiring. And I’m more excited about all of that than I am about the milestone.”
Ronzio said the company’s revenue doubled from 2019 to 2020, bringing in about $7 million last year. He said the company, which has more than 5,000 customers across 177 countries, expects to double its revenue again this year.
Ronzio founded Trainual after buying the base software from students at Arizona State University; The product came to market in 2018.
Famous funders
The latest round was led by Menlo Park, California-based Altos Ventures with additional funding from Indeed co-founder and chairman Rony Kahan and Daymond John, the CEO of the Shark Group and cast member of the ABC-TV show "Shark Tank."
"I wish Trainual was around when I was starting and scaling my company. It's a game-changer that is going to save growing businesses a ton of time, allowing them to focus on the most crucial aspects of building their companies,” John said in a written statement. “The team at Trainual gets what it takes to scale a small business. For me, their shared passion for empowering entrepreneurs make this partnership a natural fit."
Ronzio said that this funding is the result of hundreds, if not thousands, of conversation over the span of years, but Indeed chairman Kahan actually sought out Trainual. Roznio said he got a cold email from Kahan saying he had a similar idea for a business playbook software, but that Trainual had already built it, so he asked how he could get involved with the company.
Trainual previously raised a $6.78 million Series A round of funding in late 2019 from 4490 Ventures, MATH Venture Partners and PHX Ventures, all of which also participated in this Series B funding.
In their shoes
Before the pandemic, Trainual (and many other companies) operated under the premise that its employees would come to the office every day, a concept that now seems quaint in the wake of Covid-19.
Ronzio said that as Trainual’s employees went remote, it put them in a better position to understand the challenges its customers face.
“From our beginning we had a lot of remote companies using Trainual; people with distributed teams, multiple locations. And when we got thrown into that, we saw that the product is really useful for rolling out new policies,” he said. “So we started making a lot more templates for those types of scenarios that all of our customers needed.”
Ronzio also said that the company lifted its credit card requirement for trial usage and make a big marketing push, both of which helped get the Trainual platform onto the screens of more small business customers.
He said now, with millions of dollars in fresh capital in hand, the company will hire more people and make an effort to improve its platform by adding new features in the months to come.
Last September, when the company moved into its new office space, Trainual had 42 employees. Now the company is up to 63 employees (about 40 of whom are in Arizona) and it plans to hire an additional 50 in the next year or so.
Buds emerge
The Phoenix startup scene is often referred to as an ecosystem, or a group defined by its interactions with each other. For Ronzio, he said that in the past the successful startups felt like giants to him, a status that felt impossible for small companies to reach. But that has changed as Trainual has grown and more startups spring up around the Valley.
“In the last five years, I think what's emerged is this next cohort of companies that are in $5, $10, $20 million ARR (annual recurring revenue) range and building real businesses and employing dozens of people,” he said.
“That's made the community much stronger, because now there's this diversity of experience and perspectives and people, team members that have worked at several of these startups, and you can really feel that, that it's budding," he said. "The ecosystem is budding where for so long it was just seeds.”
