2016 E&Y Entrepreneur of the Year Award Winner Launches BetterSkills -- an Innovative Talent Development Software Solution

VCs Back Female Entrepreneur Tanya Bakalov for a Second Time with $1M to Launch New Venture


BOSTON, MA--(Marketwired - Nov 14, 2016) - BetterSkills, Inc, a new and upcoming software innovator, today unveiled its company operations which is in the midst of developing a cutting edge platform to better assist companies with their organizational and talent development. Founded by 2016 E&Y Entrepreneur of the Year Award winner Tanya Bakalov, BetterSkills is backed by $1 million in funding from Bain Capital Ventures, Osage Ventures, VT Technology Ventures and select angels.

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According to the Brookings Institute, human capital is one of the least measured and analyzed investments, despite the fact that more than 70% of company costs are labor related. Current trends coming out of HR TECH 2016, the world's leading human resource professional conference, indicate more and more companies are focusing on employee centric workplaces and treating the employee experience as customer experience. With this in mind, BetterSkills was created to provide a clear and decisive way to better train the workforce, enhance their skillset and provide them with options and a pathway for growth.

Using integrated and current dashboards, the BetterSkills Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform intuitively analyzes and identifies current skillsets as well as potential areas for growth, training, mentoring and job rotation within the company. Intelligent workforce analytics can be run to identify hot topic areas such as retention rates, skill gap analyses, as well as industry comparisons of teams proficiencies compared to similar companies in the market.

"BetterSkills provides a new means to uniquely enhance employees' work experiences by providing clarity and direction for learning and growing within an organization," said Bakalov. "By building the right sets of skills via informal and formal learning goals, and setting a personalized professional development path for each employee, we can help transform work cultures, enhance employee productivity and improve overall job retention and satisfaction."

In addition, BetterSkills' unique process leverages similar network algorithms used to identify data patterns in global networks and integrates this functionality with natural language processing, to understand employee relationships and development needs. The SaaS platform dynamically suggests the right mentors or mentees within a company while identifying best fit for internal job postings and job rotations based on professional development goals. Simply put, BetterSkills provides the ability to:

  • Leverage real-time organization charts that map skills.
  • Automatically assign professional development goals.
  • Automatically track goal credits.
  • Motivate employees to share and promote knowledge and skills.
  • Utilize gamification strategies -- employees see how fast they are acquiring new knowledge and skills; managers see how their teams compare to similar companies.
  • Present valuable insights on retention benchmarks and hot spots, organizational and personalized skill gaps analysis, human capital growth and development visibility.

"Tanya Bakalov has been a great partner who brought a great outcome to our fund," said Robert Adelson, Managing Partner, Osage Venture Partners. "She has an impressive track record as an entrepreneur and we look forward to the progression of BetterSkills."

"Companies invest millions of dollars in financial, marketing and sales systems to gain insight in an attempt to excel within their chosen markets. However, these companies often lack the visibility into their largest investment needed to grow -- employees," said Brian Goldsmith, a Principal at Bain Capital Ventures. "Tanya has shown an incredible ability to identify gaps in business processes and develop proven software tools that improve and optimize operations. She has once again pinpointed a critical organizational need, and we are confident BetterSkills will be embraced as a key tool driving the next generation of human capital management."

Learn how BetterSkills enables organizations to measure and analyze employees' professional development by visiting www.betterskills.com, @BetterSkillsHR, emailing better@betterskills.com or calling (857) 293-1451.

About BetterSkills
BetterSkills is the developer of an online software platform that tracks all aspects of employees professional development lives. The innovative Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering enables organizations to perform workforce analytics to identify critical gaps in skills needed for future employee development and effectively attract, grow and maintain human capital.

Contact Information:

For more information, please contact:
Betsey Rogers
BridgeView Marketing on behalf of BetterSkills
603-886-7087
betsey@bridgeviewmarketing.com