Opus, a New York-based platform for businesses with a deskless workforce, has recently raised $6.8 million in its Series A round led by Stage 2 Capital. Existing investors, including Gutter Capital, NextView Ventures, and Bling Capital, also participated in this financing round. With the funds, the company plans to accelerate its growth, including expanding the engineering and go-to-market teams, further developing the SaaS platform, and integrating into new industries.
Co-founded by Rachael Nemeth, Jeffrey Silver, and Vince Li, Opus is a mobile-first learning platform for businesses to improve the productivity of their frontline teams. The platform is designed to help businesses with a large distributed workforce minimize labour costs and increase sales by offering accessible training technology that can reach 99% of employees. It automates every part of the employee training lifecycle in a single system. It delivers all forms of training to employees’ phones through a mobile application in more than 100 languages.
Commenting on the fundraising, Co-founder & CEO of Opus, Rachael Nemeth, said:
Training technology is not accessible to most American workers, but we’re changing that. In today’s labour market, Opus is essential for businesses with frontline workers. We’re building a world where employers are not just checking a box; they are getting frontline business intelligence to make better decisions about their majority workforce. What’s next in the world of work is new knowledge, new growth and creating space for everyone. We’re thrilled to partner with Stage 2 on our next chapter.
Since its launch in early 2020, the startup has built a customer portfolio of top food service brands, including Taim, Kevin Hart’s Hart House, Just Salad, Luke’s Lobster, Swingers Golf, Gregory Coffee, Vanderbilt University, and Rhode Island School of Design.
Mandy Cole, Partner of Stage 2 Capital, added:
The deskless workforce, those that work in restaurants, manufacturing, logistics, and facilities, are the foundation of our economy. The businesses that employ these people must deliver effective training that is accessible and leads to better workplaces. We invested in Opus because the company is trailblazing a training solution for any business with a frontline workforce – something that is lacking in the current market. And we’re excited to join their Board of Directors to help the team scale and make an impact in today’s working world.
Opus is leveraging AI through its translation technology and content builder. The content builder helps customers take any content, such as a procedure change, and convert it into an interactive lesson 20 times faster than legacy solutions. As a result, their customers are seeing a decrease in manager admin time by 40% while lowering frontline labour costs by 5%-15%. Its translation technology helps reduce operating costs by automatically translating every course, message and interaction on the platform into over 100 global languages. By leveraging neural networks for automated translations and a proprietary machine learning model that understands the quality of the system’s translations, the firm achieves 95-99% accuracy.
As a part of the transaction, Opus has expanded its executive team with Doug Freeman as the Chief Revenue Officer, coming from Remesh, The Muse, and Living Social, Frances Liu as VP of Marketing, coming from Instawork and Upwork, and Opus’ Co-founder Jeffrey Silver was appointed as Chief Technology Officer and Board Director.
