Spekit, the brainchild of Pakistani powerhouse Zari Zahra and cofounder, Melanie Fellay, has announced raising $45 million in Series B funding led by Craft Ventures, with participation from Felicis, Operator Collective, Matchstick Ventures, Renegade Partners, Foundry Group, and Bonfire Ventures, as covered by Forbes. Spekit is the leading platform for onboarding and training remote teams. Now, it becomes the first female-founded company to raise funding of this calibre in Pakistan, bringing the company’s total funds raised to $60 million.
With hubs in Karachi and Denver, Spekit is attracting top-tier technical talent in Pakistan, eager to join the mission to reinvent how we learn at work. The company is rapidly expanding its presence in Pakistan and looking for new talent across software engineering, leadership, and more. Since raising a $12.2M Series A funding round in March 2021, Spekit has tripled its employee headcount and grown revenue more than 300% year-over-year. Many of the world’s most innovative companies including Uber Freight, Snowflake, Outreach, Invesco, and Southwest Airlines rely on Spekit to empower their employees with real-time knowledge and training, without disrupting their day-to-day workflows.
“Mel and I started this journey with our founding engineering team in Karachi and, while we’ve since expanded across the US, it’s clear that Silicon Valley is no longer the only place where world-class products are built. A key to achieving our growth has been leveraging the immense talent across both nations to build a collaborative, high-caliber team. This is both a competitive advantage and, on a personal level, a source of real pride for me as a Pakistani,” said Zari Zahra, Spekit’s Cofounder and Chief Product and Technology Officer. “We’re growing rapidly and intend to deepen our roots in Pakistan, as well as the US, by finding more talented people to help us build this iconic, market-defining platform.”
For the last three decades, companies have relied on PowerPoints, training sessions, learning management system courses, and manuals to educate employees on products, roles, and tools. But, between the global shift to remote work and the rapid pace of SaaS evolution, the workplace looks drastically different today than it did thirty years ago. Spekit replaces ineffective traditional training methods by surfacing bite-sized training, resources, and guidance directly within the applications employees use every day. This alleviates the pain of searching for answers by making knowledge instantly accessible right when it is needed.
“We live in a world of ‘instant’ – one-click shopping, Uber rides and Google searches. Why should we settle for anything less at work? Spekit is creating the same ease of learning in our professional lives as we have in our personal lives. We’re building an intelligent and personalized learning engine that is built for this new age of remote work, constant innovation and change” said Spekit CEO and cofounder, Melanie Fellay. “The love customers have for our product and company wouldn’t be possible without our team in Pakistan and I’m continually impressed by the caliber of talent in the country.”
Teams leverage Spekit to reduce employee ramp time, introduce new tools, roll out process changes and eliminate time spent searching for answers. When enablement leaders at OwnBackup came to Spekit, they were in a period of hyper-growth after raising a $240 million Series E funding round and scaling from 300 to more than 500 employees. “Spekit gives our reps the product and process knowledge they need to master their roles, directly within the tools they use every day like Salesforce or Slack,” said Thomas Cheriyan, the Senior Director of Learning and Development at OwnBackup. “This saves the enablement team time answering repetitive questions, but, more importantly, drives the productivity of our reps so they can focus on what they’re best at – closing deals.”
“Spekit is pioneering the future of workplace learning with their native, just-in-time enablement platform,” said Brian Murray, Partner, and COO at Craft Ventures. “Melanie and Zari are a powerhouse duo: clear vision, A+ product, cult-like customer happiness, and buzzing team culture. We’re thrilled to join Spekit as they make the tools we use more accessible and powerful.”
With this infusion of capital, Spekit will focus on scaling both the team and the platform – leveraging data to design completely personalized learning experiences for employees that will propel them from novice to master, faster.
