Israeli Startup Gloat Raises $90 Million in Round Led by Al Gore's Fund

The Israeli startup Gloat, a talent marketplace that allows employees in large organizations to match with career opportunities within their businesses, announced on Tuesday that it had concluded a funding round of $90 million.

The funding round, which was led by Generation Investment Management, included previous investors in the company: the European Accel Ventures (the leaders of the previous funding round), Intel Capital, Intel's corporate investment fund, and Lumir Ventures and Eight Roads Ventures.

Generation Investment Management is an American fund, one co-founder of which is former U.S. Vice President Al Gore. The entire sum of the funding round went directly to the company's coffers – it didn't include acquisitions from existing shareholders. Including this round of funding, the company has raised $182 million so far.

Gloat started out as a startup called Workey, which mediated between employees and companies. About four-and-a-half years ago, the company pivoted and converted its product for internal organizational needs.

“We started the company six years ago in order to help people with the next step of their career. But we realized that oftentimes, the next step is actually within the organization itself,” says CEO Ben Reuveni, who founded Gloat together with VP Amichai Schreiber and Chief Marketing Officer Danny Shtainberg.

Employees in giant corporations struggle to keep up with the many positions their workplace offers and are frequently unfamiliar with various profession opportunities it provides. Gloat is designed to solve these problems, and benefits the employer by helping retain these employees.

Through Gloat, the companies’ human resources departments receive access to data that they can use to effectively organize their workforce, recognize when there is a shortage of workers with specific skills, when they should hire more people and more.

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“Our system runs every aspect related to the employee’s career inside the organization,” says Reuveni. “It’s a kind of marketplace, a kind of internal LinkedIn, which offers the employees, for example, to take part in projects existing in the organization, professional courses, mentoring other workers – and finding a different position within the organization. The system makes all these matches.”

The organizations with which Gloat works are very large – most of them with over 5,000 employees, and some of them with tens of thousands of employees. Their largest client has hundreds of thousands of employees using their system. Some examples include Pepsico, Walmart, Nestle and Mastercard. Gloat itself employs about 300 people, half of them in Israel. In addition to Tel Aviv, it has offices in London, New York, and Melbourne.

Last June, Gloat announced a third fundraising round, for a sum of $57 million. Since then, market sentiment has changed significantly.

This funding round felt different from the previous ones, Reuveni said. "During the previous round there was a lot of noise – there was lots of hype and everyone wanted to invest and join in. As CEO, what I tried to do was choose the partners that would enable us to reach the next stage, and not necessarily the fund that offered the highest value. In this round there was less noise, and that’s actually an advantage. In the final analysis it was relatively fast, and we raised the sum we wanted,"

As for the money Gloat raised, Reuveni said, “We plan to put it towards growth in the development and product departments. We are also considered leaders in our field. That’s why we'll also invest significantly in marketing – in order to increase our market share," Reuveni said.