Nestor Raises $2M in Seed to Help Organizations Forge New Ways to Develop and Retain Talent

The end of the year is coming with great news for us, at Nestor. We’re thrilled to announce that we raised a $2 million seed round to advance our mission and support organizations worldwide to move beyond the traditional rigid jobs architecture and build agile people strategies based on skills.

The round was led by Eleven Ventures with the participation of Underline Ventures and angel investors from the San Francisco Bay Area. Lead investor, Eleven Ventures has been an early backer and key part of scaling into the global markets of companies such as Payhawk and Gtmhub in verticals like fintech and the future of work.

The world of work has significantly changed during the last two years, creating unprecedented global challenges. The Covid pandemic has rapidly accelerated the adoption of new technologies, leading to the transition to hybrid work environments and impacting the nature of jobs, that constantly evolve and require new types of skills.

On top of that, workplace trends like the Great Resignation and Quiet Quitting are putting even more pressure on organizations to overcome the talent shortage and find new ways to address the dynamic needs of today’s workforce, which has changed too. In the aftermath of the pandemic, people want to have a say about their work and development and want to work for companies where their careers have clear paths forward.

As a result, organizations are forced to rethink their workforce development strategies and craft meaningful growth opportunities for each employee based on both their unique talent and organizational needs. In essence, this is what Nestor is all about: helping organizations build agile people strategies to match the fast-changing business needs.

We bring together employee engagement, performance management, and development planning with a skills-based approach and use predictive analytics and nudging automation to help organizations develop and retain talent in the new hybrid world. Our solution links skills to the most important talent operations by creating a unified skills-based profile to enable employees to forge new career paths or make lateral moves inside the organization according to their interests and business needs. With Nestor, each employee is empowered to take ownership of their own development, access new growth opportunities, get involved in cross-functional initiatives, and learn new future-fit skills that will help them to succeed.

“Every employee is unique. We envision a world where every employee receives the right opportunity at the right time to continually learn and improve the skills that will help them succeed. We help organizations make an impact on each employee’s development and enable HR people leaders to build agile people strategies that move beyond the traditional job approach by placing skills at the front and center of their talent operations.” states Bogdan Apostol, CEO of Nestor.

With all the fast-paced environment, job transformations, and the rise of a multi-generational dynamic workforce with different skill sets and continuous aspirations for self-development, it’s become imperative to act in anticipation of the future. As the need to build future-fit skills will be critical in the next years, we aim to help companies enable flexible and personalized career development for each employee. By realigning HR talent operations to match the skill needs we support organizations to build a high-performing agile workforce and drive change at scale.

Nestor is now trusted by HR and people leaders in the most forward-thinking mid-to-large enterprises, including Fortune 500 companies, across Europe, North America, and Latin America. Our platform achieves a high adoption rate of 98% organizational-wide, as employees see a clear output in their individual career growth, develop new skills, discover opportunities, take new roles, and are retained for longer. As we are heading toward the next phase of our growth, we are beyond grateful to our clients, with whom we work in close partnership to forge new ways to retain and develop talent.

What our partnership with Eleven Ventures means

Looking ahead, the challenges facing HR executives and organizations will continue to be more and more complex as they constantly need to adapt to the new world of work. As we are constantly pursuing our mission – creating a world of work with equal development opportunities for each employee based on their skills, rather than past experience, education, or jobs – we looked for a partner whose mission was compatible with our own.

We were pleased to partner with Eleven Ventures, a visionary VC fund with a focus on tech companies aimed at shaping the future of work. Eleven Ventures was one of the earliest backers that played a key role in the global expansion of companies like Payhawk and Gtmhub.

“Bogdan and his team are reimagining the multi-billion dollar people analytics and talent software market by offering workforce visibility over non-linear assets such as employee skills & capabilities, engagement, performance, culture, and career mobility in an effortless and codified way. We are thrilled to join Nestor’s journey to deliver an end-to-end people intelligence platform to support organizations worldwide” adds Vassil Terziev, Managing Partner of Eleven. 

We are also happy to have beside us Underline Ventures, the first solo GP fund in CEE. The Underline Ventures team is lead by Bogdan Iordache, seasoned investor and founder of How to Web. Amongst the tech professionals in Underline VC you can find Vlad Ionescu, ex-UiPath Global Head of Growth Marketing, now the CMO of Tokinomo.

“We’re excited to work with Bogdan and Raluca. We’ve been knowing them for a long time and they’ve always been passionate about organizational development. We couldn’t be more happier that we were there to help them identify the best partners to scale globally with.” adds Bogdan Iordache, General Partner at Underline.

This funding round will enable us to grow our sales and customer success teams and accelerate expansion on the newly entered US and Latin America markets with a focus on mid-to-large enterprises. Our company will further invest in product innovation and plans to launch the smart career pathing module so that employees can easily explore what are the alternative paths they can take in their careers and the types of skills they should focus on in the next period.

Read our press release on CMSWire.com.

For media inquiries, please contact us at: media@nestorup.com.