Opus, a training platform for businesses with a deskless workforce, today announced the close of a $6.8 million Series A funding round led by Stage 2 Capital. Existing investors including Gutter Capital, NextView Ventures, and Bling Capital also participated in this funding round. The funding comes on the heels of a $2 million round less than a year ago, led by Gutter Capital with participation from Chelsea Clinton’s Metrodora. This Series A capital will help Opus confront the frontline worker shortage via the same AI technology that the majority of software companies are leveraging for desk-workers. It will also accelerate Opus’ growth including the expansion of the engineering and go-to-market teams, the further development of the SaaS platform, and the integration into new industries.
Businesses in the United States employ a total of 110 million deskless workers and make up relatively 70% of the overall workforce, yet they lack access to technology to help them do their jobs better. There are reportedly 1,200 learning management systems, “LMS” on the market, yet only 30% of businesses with deskless workers have invested in one. Over 70% of Opus customers are switching from no software at all such as Shipley Donuts, & Pizza, and Salt & Straw. Since 2021, employers have seen record high voluntary turnover rates, contributing to the post-pandemic labor shortage. Businesses are now investing in new software like Opus to deliver training throughout the employee lifecycle in order to increase employee output and retention while lowering labor costs.
“Training technology is not accessible to the majority of American workers, but we’re changing that,” says Rachael Nemeth, co-founder and CEO at Opus. “In today’s labor market, Opus is an essential tool for businesses with frontline workers. We’re building a world where employers are not just checking a box, they are getting frontline business intelligence so they can make better decisions about their majority workforce. What’s next in the world of work is new knowledge, new growth and creating space for everyone. We’re thrilled to partner with Stage 2 on our next chapter.”
Opus is designed to help businesses with a large distributed workforce minimize labor costs and increase sales by offering accessible training technology that can reach 99% of employees. General learning management systems only reach 1 in 5 employees due to being desktop-based, English-only, and burdensome to field managers. Opus automates every part of the employee training lifecycle in a single system and delivers all forms of training to employees’ phones through a mobile application that is available in more than 100 languages.
Opus is leveraging AI through their translation technology and content builder. The content builder helps customers take any content, such as a procedure change, and convert it into an interactive lesson 20 times faster than legacy solutions. As a result their customers are seeing a decrease in manager admin time by 40% while lowering frontline labor costs by 5%-15%. Opus translation technology helps reduce operating costs by automatically translating every course, message and interaction on the platform into over 100 global languages. By leveraging neural networks for automated translations and a proprietary machine learning model which understands the quality of the translations the system produces, Opus achieves 95-99% accuracy.
“The deskless workforce, those that work in restaurants, manufacturing, logistics, and facilities, are the foundation of our economy. It’s imperative that the businesses who employ these people deliver effective training that is accessible and leads to better workplaces,” says Mandy Cole, Partner of Stage 2 Capital. “We invested in Opus because the company is trailblazing a training solution for any business with a frontline workforce – something that is lacking in the current market. And, we’re excited to join their Board of Directors to help the team scale and make an impact in today’s working world.”
Since launching in early 2020, Opus has built a customer portfolio of top food service brands including Taim, Kevin Hart’s Hart House, Just Salad, Luke’s Lobster, Swingers Golf, Gregorys Coffee, Vanderbilt University, and Rhode Island School of Design. In addition to welcoming Mandy Cole, Partner of Stage 2 Capital, as a Board Director, Opus expanded its executive team with Doug Freeman as the Chief Revenue Officer, coming from Remesh, The Muse, and Living Social, Frances Liu as VP of Marketing, coming from Instawork and Upwork, and Opus’ Co-founder Jeffrey Silver was appointed as Chief Technology Officer and Board Director.
