Pre-Skilling the World: Forage’s Series B

By Mercedes Bent & Alex Taussig

We couldn’t be prouder of the team at Forage as they announce the closing of their $25M USD Series B round, led by our friends at Blackbird, Australia’s premiere VC fund. We first invested in the Australian-founded Forage a year ago as the pandemic’s effects were taking full swing. With traditional in-person interviews and networking opportunities drying up, job seekers across the globe were scrambling for new means of connecting with employers.

Forage became a go-to content and hiring platform for learners during that time. In fact, when we announced our investment in September 2020, Forage had just crossed 1 million learners enrolling in their programs. Earlier this year, Forage hit the 2 million mark and continues to grow quickly.

What is even more exciting is the hiring data shared by Forage’s hiring partners. Data shows that a Forager is 4x more likely to get offered a role where they complete a company’s course beforehand and 3x more likely to accept an offer. This underscores that the programs are delivering tangible employment outcomes.

Beyond the numbers, we’ve been so thrilled to see the Forage founders’ vision come to life. Tom Brunskill and Pasha Rayan believe in a world where access to the world’s most sought-after employers is democratized, and any individual that demonstrates the skills to work somewhere can — regardless of where they went to school or grew up.

In the last year Forage also welcomed marquee customers such as Walmart, SAP, PWC, Fidelity, Goldman Sachs, Electronic Arts, Cognizant, and Aon. In the increasingly competitive talent market, companies like these are moving further up-funnel and offering candidates free training on the skills they’ll need to join, before they join.

Forage calls this pre-skilling, and it’s one of the newest trends we’re seeing in training & hiring. Companies are realizing they can’t just wait until after candidates are employees to re-skill or up-skill them into new roles internally. They need to de-risk hires by providing pre-training that ensures for both sides it’s a great match.

Forage’s industry leadership in this new approach has been tremendous to watch and be a part of. Forage continues to partner with clients across the globe in Asia Pacific, the Americas, Europe and Africa.

We couldn’t be more excited for this new round of funding to help them continue their global march toward democratizing career discovery and hiring. Onward!