Podcasts are the latest media craze, and even education companies are tapping into the trend.
Grovo, a New York City-based startup that produces short videos for workplace training, has been using podcasts for its own company trainings. It’s now adding these short audio clips, along with other formats like short tasks, to the content it sells to its customers.
To fund this new push, Grovo said on Tuesday that it has raised $40 million in new funding.
Grovo is among an increasing number of companies in the online education space focusing on workplace and career-related content. Others include Pluralsight, Coursera, LinkedIn-owned Lynda.com, Udemy, and Udacity, among others.
Grovo’s signature is its ultra-short videos, usually a minute-long, for teaching employees without boring them with lessons that are too long. The company, which has a catalogue of more than 5,000 videos companies can use, also works with customers that want content tailored to their own businesses like internal policies and procedures.
Nick Narodny, Surag Mungekar, and Jeff Fernandez founded Grovo in 2010, but didn’t narrow their focus to working with companies until 2013, Fernandez told Coins2Day a few months ago. Today, the company has just under 1,000 customers including WeWork and the NBA in 190 countries, although most of its business is in the U.S. Grovo plans to continue to focus on its domestic business for the rest of this year, but it has serious international expansion is on its agenda for 2017, said Fernandez.
Get Data Sheet, Coins2Day’s technology newsletter.
Existing investor Accel Partners led this latest funding round, with additional participation from Costanoa Venture Capital, SoftTech VC, Greg Waldorf, and new investor Vayner Capital. To date, the company has raised a total of $65 million.