Y Combinator-backed startup Nestor, a People Intelligence Platform that is transforming the way organizations develop and retain talent by creating a common language for skills at work, announced today that it has raised a $2 million seed round for further expansion. The round is led by Eleven Ventures, joined by Underline Ventures, and prominent 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.

Over the past years, the transition to hybrid work environments coupled with ongoing phenomena such as the Great Resignation and Quiet Quitting, have forced organizations to rethink their workforce development strategies. The rigid structure of jobs inside the organizations and pushing training for employees from top down, assuming the organization knows best what are the skills people need, clearly do not work in this new dynamic. Furthermore, this has a negative impact on employees, leaving the individual with the feeling that they have no say over the work that they do. Tomorrow’s workforce development is agile, business-focused, and democratized to give people far more ownership, opportunity, and equity.

Nestor’s People Intelligence Platform brings together employee engagement, performance management, and development planning with a skills-based approach and uses predictive analytics and nudging automation to help organizations develop and retain talent. The 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 lateral moves based on both their interests and the organizational 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 succeed.

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. Nestor’s platform achieves a 98% adoption rate in organizations, as employees see a clear output in their individual career growth, develop new skills, discover opportunities, take new roles, and are retained for longer. Recently, UiPath’s Chief Culture Officer Andreea Baciu became an advisor.

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

“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.”, says Bogdan Apostol, CEO & Co-founder of Nestor.

”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.”, says Bogdan Iordache, General Partner at Underline.

The post Organizations helped to put skills at the center of their talent operations, the promise of Y Combinator-backed startup Nestor appeared first on Startups&TheCity.

Former UiPath General Counsel Vasile Tiple launches Goodlegal, a legal infrastructure platform aimed at providing organizations with an out-of-the-box legal operations framework to achieve legal compliance by leveraging the latest technology advancements and industry-standard content.  

Goodlegal received a pre-seed investment of €1.2 million from early UiPath investors Earlybird Digital East Fund, which led the round, Credo Ventures together with Daniel Dines, and including the latest CEE VC fund, Underline Ventures.

“We are starting our journey to reinvent legal and help our customers to focus on their business, develop great products and become self-sufficient with Goodlegal infrastructure. Our mission is to make legal easy, accessible, and actionable.”, says Vasile Tiple.

Goodlegal is a one-stop-shop for legal compliance which aims to democratize legal by providing individuals and organizations with a legal infrastructure platform to drive frictionless engagement with the stakeholders. It offers various functionalities, ranging from drag-and-drop document builder to out-of-the-box documents, editor and text analysis, e-signature, automation functionalities, and integrations, through which every organization can achieve a sound legal compliance and operations framework in no time. 

Currently, there isn’t a platform available to provide a prebuilt legal infrastructure needed for the daily operations of a company. The entire legal tech market was built around very specific features without considering the bigger picture of what a company might need to be legally compliant. Even the end-user legal market evolved in two different directions: tools built for external lawyers on one side and tools built for in-house lawyers on the other side. Goodlegal is addressing both these legal market inconsistencies by addressing the needs of both law firms and in-house lawyers.

”We aim for Goodlegal to become the industry-accepted <legal operating system>, a standard blueprint for how to put your legal infrastructure in place. Our immediate goal is to be the go-to legal platform for all startups and help them freely achieve the next stage in their company evolution, while medium and long-term goals include large enterprises for which we are developing various integrations, creating a Goodlegal ecosystem for any company irrespective of its size or industry.”, adds Vasile Tiple.  

Vasile Tiple was UiPath’s General Counsel and the architect of the global legal and compliance team. He was at the forefront of designing and implementing the company’s legal operations, support, and automation vision. In his last role at UiPath as Head of Legal & Compliance Automation, Vasile created the go-to-market of the internal Legal Automation Program he implemented in 2016 in UiPath Legal to use RPA for legal work. Vasile has a Ph.D. in International Law from the University of Bucharest, is an author of various academic papers on law, administration, and AI, and previously worked at various organizations, including Adobe.

The post Former UiPath General Counsel launches Goodlegal, backed by UiPath founder and early investors appeared first on Startups&TheCity.

Investor and founder Bogdan Iordache is launching Underline Ventures, a solo general partner venture fund targeting early-stage high-growth Eastern European startups with global ambitions, thus joining the ranks of solo VC managers emerging in Europe. Underline Ventures’ debut fund has raised €10m, with a final target of €20m.

Best known as the founder of How to Web, one of Europe’s top 10 startup conferences, started in 2010, Bogdan has also been the founder of Conectoo (exited in 2013) and a former investor for Gecad Ventures, 3TS Capital Partners, and MVP Academy.

”Our fund thesis is generational. We believe the Eastern European tech industry hit a critical mass of experienced founders and operators from scale-ups that are now starting or contributing to new startups, along with many young ambitious founders. While their expertise is excellent on the operational side, we believe Underline Ventures can help them understand the venture way and connect them with the world of venture capital, so they can build high-growth startups, not only successful companies“, Bogdan says.

Underline Ventures is backed by 20+ founders and early-stage operators from companies such as UiPath, Green Horse Games, Telerik, Elrond, MorphL, Smartbill, CleverTaxi, Tremend, and many others, along with professional investors in venture funds.

The fund is already a one-year effort, and the team includes experienced founders and operators from the tech world: Vlad Ionescu – Venture Partner, ex-UiPath, Iulian Circiumaru – Venture Partner, ex-7Card, Iulia Ghita – Investment Manager, ex-Bookster, Adriana Spulber, Sebastian Boureanu, Mihaela Ciobanu.

The post How to Web’s founder Bogdan Iordache is launching a venture fund targeting CEE startups appeared first on Startups&TheCity.