Participated · Seed · Oct 2019

Stellic provides a centralized degree progression platform designed to help students, advisors, and administrators manage advising, degree audits, degree planning, and analytics. The platform aims to ensure students stay on track and receive a personalized educational experience. More than 45 colleges and universities now use Stellic to promote student agency and to help administrators scale personalized support. The company was founded in 2016 by Sabih Bin Wasi, Rukhsar Neyaz, and Musab Popatia and is based in San Francisco, CA. Stellic plans to use the new funding to grow its team and its community of institutional partners and to enhance student-centric capabilities on the platform. The company raised $11M in the reported funding round. Stellic offers a platform that lets students plan college careers and schedule courses, automating what previously took days into seconds. Founded in 2016 and based in Palo Alto, Calif., the company works with 15 university partners, including University of Chicago, University of Minnesota and Carnegie Mellon. The platform is heavily used at Carnegie Mellon, where the company reports 88% of undergraduates have logged in; Stellic records more than 300,000 plan activities and 1.4 million course searches per year. The founding team includes Sabih Bin Wasi and cofounder Rukhsar Neyaz Khan; the company has 10 full-time employees. Stellic says it is currently profitable and sells to schools on a per-student, per-year basis. The company plans to use the new seed funds for marketing to win additional university customers and is exploring expanded features such as scheduling extracurricular activities.

Participated · Seed · Jan 2019

Hone delivers live, small-group, executive-focused instruction with curriculum-based modules, practice labs, peer discussion and reinforcement rather than pre-recorded content or one-on-one coaching. New learners enter a four-week bootcamp selected by their company and then gain unlimited access to classes year-round; the platform also offers automation tools for HR admins such as automatic scheduling and attendance tracking. Hone has integrations with Workday, Rippling and SAP SuccessFactors and says instructors are paid “hundreds of dollars per hour,” reportedly four to five times typical one-on-one coaching rates. The startup cites customer wins including Indeed, ConocoPhillips, Pacific Sunwear, Allscripts, TomTom and Aramark and says the pandemic was a significant tailwind for its growth. The company currently has about 70 employees and plans to hire roughly 30 more by the end of the year. Future plans include experimenting with “intelligent” recommendations and reinforcement, expanding electives and learning pathways, and hosting in-person events for executives. Hone offers leadership training via live, intimate online classes led by coaches, with new students entering a four-week bootcamp and then receiving unlimited access to classes throughout the year. The platform emphasizes practice-based learning for difficult conversations, coaching, and communication skills that benefit managers more than one-off in-person conferences. Hone’s software simplifies scheduling across geographies and time zones for distributed workforces. Co-founders Savina Perez and Tom Griffiths say meeting strong enterprise demand requires work on localization and translation. The company notes scaling is challenging because the product depends heavily on human coaches rather than a pure SaaS model. To date, Hone has over 100 organizational customers, 300 classes per month, 400% year-over-year growth, and a 30-person team (50% female, 43% people of color). Hone combines research-backed, live online classes led by expert executive coaches with a technology platform to reinforce and measure training’s impact at scale. Its hybrid humans-plus-technology approach targets leadership, management, and people-skills training for distributed teams. Customers cited in the announcement include GoFundMe, Rosetta Stone, Casper, World Remit and Dashlane. Launched in 2018 and headquartered in San Francisco and New York City, Hone was co-founded by Tom Griffiths and Savina Perez. The company announced a $2.75M seed extension, bringing total funding to date to $6.4M, and said it will use the funds to expand its platform and develop programs to meet rising demand from increasingly distributed companies. Hone offers live, coach-led training modules for leadership and people management, typically delivered as 60- to 90-minute weekly sessions over seven weeks to groups of about eight to a dozen. The company eschews pre-recorded video and traditional workshops, instead working with vetted professional coaches and an underlying platform that tracks attendance, learner feedback and engagement metrics such as questions asked. Hone has run pilots with early, paying customers including WeWork, Clear, App Annie, Dashlane, Omada Health and SoulCycle and says it has used those pilots to refine product-market fit. The platform includes reporting interfaces that allow employers to measure learning outcomes and iterate on modules. Hone is about 10 months old and is opening more widely for business while planning to bake lessons from early customers into future products. The company has not disclosed pricing publicly and works with customers to create customized packages.