Lessonly Inc., a fast-growing startup from Indianapolis working to improve how companies provide employee training, today announced that it has raised $8 million in funding to step up the effort.

The investment was led by returning backer OpenView Venture Partners, which previously participated in Lessonly’s $5 Series A round last March. The period since has seen the startup triple in size to 80 employees and grow the number of companies that use its namesake employee learning platform to more than 500.

Lessonly enables organizations to create digital courses for helping staffers hone their skills, as well internalize new information such as product pricing changes. Such knowledge can often be difficult to disseminate in a consistent manner via traditional communications channels. To ensure a meaningful training experience, Lessonly provides several different teaching features that each take a different approach to instilling information in the learner.

The platform lets companies use a mix of text, photos and video content in a course to help make the subject matter more approachable. A team can then create custom quizzes tailored for the topic to test workers’ understanding. Moreover, Lessonly offers a recording tool called Video Response that makes it possible to check how an employee would perform in a real-world scenario such as a client meeting.

The feature also creates an opportunity for colleagues to share feedback with one another. For added measure, the interface has an “Ask the Expert” button that a learner can click to request specific information.

Lessonly said companies mainly use its platform to train sales and customer service teams. That’s because such personnel often rely primarily on practical knowledge that changes over time, rather than a rigid set of best practices. 

The new funding will let Lessonly further widen the reach of its platform and hire more workers to help with the push. The investment comes not long after Kahoot AS, a fellow education startup, raised $20 million from investors to more aggressively go after the enterprise market. The company’s gamified learning platform is used to train more than a million workers every month even though it was originally built with schools in mind.

Image: Lessonly