From day one our vision at Sounding Board has been to develop the world’s most impactful leaders – by delivering access to executive level coaching earlier in a leaders career when they need it most. Having started off as coach and coachee ourselves, we had a vision of scaling leadership coaching to managers and leaders of all levels in a way that was impactful and measurable.
Today, we’re proud to share that Sounding Board, Inc has raised $30M in Series B funding!
We welcome our new lead investor, Jazz Venture Partners, who are joined by existing investors Canaan, Bloomberg Beta, Precursor Ventures and Correlation Partners. Jazz’s thesis is to “Unlock Human Potential” – and they share our vision of leadership coaching to do just that. We’re also thrilled to welcome Gaingels, Engage and an all-star panel of female investors passionate about coaching: Deb Liu (CEO of Ancestry.com), Yvonne Chen (former VP, Marketing of Udemy), Sukhinder Singh Cassidy (Founder of theBoardlist) and Tammy Aguillon (Area VP @ DocuSign). As female founders, we have a passion and commitment to support and amplify diverse leaders and voices – from the work we do at Sounding Board to living our values on our cap table as we scale.
Having just announced our Series A funding earlier this year, our rapid growth is a testament to the shift we’re seeing across the global workforce. In the past year we have seen demand explode, with ARR growing over 350% year over year, several Fortune 1000 logos, and sequential growth for the past seven quarters. We also tripled the number of employees while maintaining a strong culture of collaboration and teamwork.
In the earlier stages of the pandemic, there was a huge shift to remote work and concern for how to develop leaders virtually. Today, it’s expected to see one third of employees working remotely in 2022. CEOs and HR leaders have realized how urgently they need to develop new skill sets in their teams to meet modern business challenges. One of the biggest struggles has been the ability to manage and lead teams effectively, especially in a virtual world. This has not only led to record levels of employee burnout and stress, but also unprecedented attrition and turnover known as the Great Resignation.
In these times, virtual leadership coaching has emerged as a go-to-model for talent development. The introduction of technology into the space has not only made access to coaching scalable, but also measurable. Sounding Board’s personalized approach, blend of skill development and real-time application lends itself well to times of rapid change. We’re thrilled that many of our customers like Bill.com, UserTesting and Chime have IPO’ed and scaled while highlighting their commitment to leadership as a core driver of their success.
We invested our Series A in the development of an industry-leading Coaching Management System (CMS) designed to deliver scalable leadership coaching, as well as global expansion of our best-in-class managed coach network. Enterprises can now use the same platform to manage, measure and scale all coaching programs and engagements, leveraging Sounding Board’s AI coach matching algorithm, automated workflows, and digital tools such as our Agile Leadership Roadmap™.
With our Series B round, we will accelerate our investment in data, reporting & science on the product & technology side, building towards our vision of becoming the coaching enablement platform for the world’s largest enterprises. We’ll continue to invest in our go-to-market teams to partner closely with new and existing customers to further deploy coaching across their orgs. And you’ll see us start to partner more broadly across the leadership and HR ecosystem to bring our innovative platform to more and more leaders.
This wouldn’t be possible without the incredible team we have been lucky to work with, our amazing coaches, our partners and investors, and of course, our customers and the leaders we are privileged to coach.
We are excited for the future of Sounding Board, and the growth that’s coming. Also, we’re hiring! Join us in our mission to develop the world’s most impactful leaders.
Sincerely,
Christine Tao & Lori Mazan
Join Our Team!
Our mission is to develop the next generation of leaders in more personalized, impactful way. Learn more about what it means to be part of Sounding Board and see new positions that we are hiring for!
