Sounding Board, Inc, a cloud-based coaching platform, announced the close of an oversubscribed $13.1M Series A funding led by Canaan Partners and other investors.
During 2020, the overnight shift to remote work caused by COVID-19 accelerated enterprise demand for Sounding Board’s Coaching Enablement Platform™ and managed coach network.
According to the firm, the digital coaching market is estimated at $30B by 2025*, with explosive ‘hockey stick’ growth as enterprises move to virtual, scalable coaching solutions. Sounding Board’s unique approach and customizable platform focus on coaching for business outcomes versus individual health & wellness.
Sounding Board says they solve the most challenging problems facing companies today – “the ability to quickly develop leaders for measurable business impact, at scale, in times of rapid change.”
Customers include Bloomberg, Kraft Heinz, Intel, VMWare, Cloudera as well as rapid-growth startups such as Chime, Plaid, and Dropbox.
“Coaching is at an inflection point – it’s a massive opportunity and the timing is right. Sounding Board is the only company providing leadership development designed to drive business goals, unlike the many companies providing coaching for health and wellness,” noted Maha Ibrahim, General Partner at Canaan. Ibrahim will join Sounding Board’s all-female Board of Directors effective immediately.
Canaan Partners General Partner
Beyond simply delivering coaching virtually, Sounding Board goes to the next level, providing a complete, end-to-end, cloud-based coaching platform that supports a dynamic coaching ecosystem for the enterprise. Sounding Board’s solution allows enterprises to seamlessly manage, scale, and measure coaching on one unified platform.
Proprietary AI-Powered tools remove the administrative burden around coach matching, scheduling, and program management to allow coaching to scale broadly. Its clear competitive advantage is a scalable, adaptive approach to leadership development that is personalized to the learning style and cadence of each individual. Clients saw major improvements across key capabilities, including a 173% increase in the ability to successfully interact with others across all functions.*
