PR NewsWire | Feb 01 2023
- $5M seed round led by Investible; $9M in total funding raised to date
- Investment to further accelerate product development in Generative AI Coach ‘Marlee’, the powerful behavioral change app embraced by Canva, Atlassian, KPMG and Baraja
- New third party integrations to offer a ‘Grammarly-like experience’. Users will experience coaching suggestions in real-time within work and collaboration platforms
SYDNEY, Feb. 1, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — Fingerprint for Success (F4S) today announce a new AU$5 million funding round led by Investible with other Australian and U.S. VCs including Five V Capital, and Salesforce Ventures. Together, they join early investor ROCeteer, and other seed investors including Google Maps co-founder Lars Rasmussen, Canva co-founders Melanie Perkins, Cliff Obrecht and Cameron Adams, as well as former Australian Prime Minister the Hon. Malcolm Turnbull AC and noted Australian tech investor Roger Allen, bringing the total seed investment to AU$9 million.
F4S and AI Coach Marlee is world-first technology pioneering the democratization of coaching, carving a new category for technology driven human development. The Australian founded startup responds to a problem-state where traditionally just 2% of the population, typically the elite or those with the means, have access to personalized coaching.
Confidence in the startup is supported by significant 300% YoY user growth from the US, UK and India. These insights contribute to Marlee’s wider datapool, with more than 900,000 AI coaching minutes delivered, which collectively, have helped users from 194 countries work towards more than 100,000 goals.
Coupled with Founder and CEO Michelle Duval’s 25 years expertise as a pioneer in the professional coaching space, AI Coach Marlee and the F4S platform is built from decades of evidence-based research developed by a team of behavioral data scientists, coaches, and AI engineers.
The layered technology offers a digital and scalable solution for individuals and teams to understand and bring out the best in themselves, and each other. Already embraced by more than 20,000 organizations including teams from Atlassian, Hubspot, AWS, KPMG, as well as Canva and Baraja, the cutting edge technology gives users a suite of tools to scale cohesive, high-performing teams and culture.
Michelle Duval says companies have historically held an inherited bias for ‘hard’ technical skills, adding:
"There has been a focus until now for companies to prioritize hard, technical skills deemed necessary for performance. Though, it’s actually the ‘soft’ or what we like to call human skills that have proven time and time again to make or break teams and are the most crucial in building goal-oriented, efficient and purpose-driven teams" says Duval.
Michelle speaks to the future of work, adding:
"There’s a driving need to rapidly grow resources and solutions to solve the complex problems Gen Alpha, GenZs and Millennials inherit. F4S’s scalable technology is an always ready, real time solution to optimize the otherwise untapped potential within our future problem solvers helping both individuals and teams to invent and navigate brighter futures."
Investible cofounder Trevor Folsom shares that belief, adding that the ability to unlock, streamline and enhance soft skills at work is crucial for high-performance teams.
"Michelle and her team at F4S have managed to use technology to shape the future of work by helping businesses build a stronger, more resilient workforce," shares Trevor.
Reshmi Buthello, VP of People and Culture at Baraja said that F4S has removed the limitations of 1:1 coaching, providing a fully automated and scalable solution that can be deployed across Baraja’s offices worldwide:
"Our team is embracing the F4S experience. With Coach Marlee, we’re seeing a significant increase in team engagement and retention. Our teams have the power of an "always-on" coach that is not only personalized to individual drivers and motivations, but as a powerful cloud-based solution it’s also scalable to support our ever-changing team dynamics."
The capital raised will be primarily used to make F4S’ real-time personal and team insights and coaching accessible via additional third party integrations within work and collaboration platforms such as Slack and Zoom.
This approach builds on from F4S’ successful applicant tracking integration with HR software Greenhouse, designed to provide hiring managers with intel on candidate suitability and success in the culture of their potential new workplace.
As the world wakes to the power of Generative AI, building upon F4S’s proprietary and validated Conversational AI models, F4S is uniquely poised to take advantage of ChatGPT’s accelerating momentum.
Michelle concludes, "We’re really excited to welcome investors aligned to our vision to join us in the next stage of growth. We’re looking forward to strengthening our market footprint across the US, the UK and Asia Pacific, and to ship even more value to our users and teams."
"Coach Marlee is improving personal, team and company performance. We’re building self confidence, self esteem, and helping teams work better together. Ultimately, we’re helping people find meaning and fulfillment at work."
For more information visit www.f4s.com
PR Contact:
Isabella Donato, PR Manager – Fingerprint for Success (F4S)
+61 (0) 448 002 962 | isabella@f4s.com
About Fingerprint for Success (F4S)
Fingerprint For Success (F4S) is a web-app that uses layered technology, data and conversational AI to empower individuals and teams to achieve amazing things in work, business and life. Based on over 20 years of research, F4S’s revolutionary predictive analytics have achieved over 90% reliability in forecasting personal and team motivations, behaviors, and performance. In 2021, F4S launched the world’s first AI Coach ‘Marlee’ to help users to optimize their talents and bring out the best in themselves and their teammates. For more information visit www.f4s.com
About Investible
Investible is a global early-stage venture capital firm backing the visionaries advancing humanity through technology. Its mission is to connect ground-breaking companies with the capital, expertise, and networks they need to realize their potential on a global scale.
Founded in 2014 and with offices in Sydney and Singapore, its unique approach to early-stage tech investment sees its VC Funds co-investing alongside members of Club Investible: an active, global investor community. Its group portfolio includes more than 100 early-stage companies across 9 countries and 20 sectors. https://investible.com
About Five V Capital
Five V Capital is a leading private company investor in the Australian and New Zealand markets. Five V invests across Venture Capital, Growth Equity and Private Equity, with over A$1.4 billion in funds under management (FUM). Five V has made over 40 venture capital investments over the past ten years, investing in the likes of Canva, Siteminder, ROKT, Grow and Cascade. Five V believes in balancing profit with purpose and is B Corp certified. For more information, please visit www.fivevcapital.com
About Salesforce Ventures
Salesforce Ventures helps enterprising founders build companies that reinvent the way the world works. Since 2009, we’ve invested in and partnered with more than 400 of the world’s most tenacious enterprise software companies from seed to IPO, including Airtable, Databricks, DocuSign, Guild Education, Hopin, monday.com, nCino, Snowflake, Snyk, Stripe, Tanium, and Zoom. Salesforce Ventures leverages our decades of expertise in the cloud and our long-term relationships with key decision-makers at thousands of businesses around the world to give our portfolio companies an unfair advantage, help them build credibility, and accelerate growth. Salesforce Ventures has invested in more than 25 countries with offices all over the world including in San Francisco, Irvine, New York, London, Tokyo, and Sydney. Follow @SalesforceVC and learn more at http://www.salesforceventures.com.
