Modal Raises $6.7 Million as the First Mastery Platform to Help Employees Develop Technical Skills Through Cohort Learning and Coaching

Modal is announcing the launch of the world’s first Mastery Platform to deliver technical skills through cohort-based, hands-on learning and expert guidance to help employers and employees predictably develop critical skills. Modal is the only platform to bring together disparate modules including coaching, projects, live sessions, labs and video learning into a common experience to empower employees to achieve mastery in technical skills. With $6.7M raised from Signalfire, Norwest Venture Partners, Learn Capital, Bling Capital, multiple cohorts have completed Modal journeys with more than 87% of employees meeting learning objectives. Seeing the market demand for technical talent coupled with the struggle to develop internal talent, co-founders Darren Shimkus, previously President at Udemy for Business and Dennis Yang, former CEO of Udemy have built Modal to be a cohesive experience for social learning, with targeted goals and peer and instructor accountability.

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Modal helps employers to reliably and predictably upskill employees with technical skills to stay ahead of the competition and provide each employee with a personalized learning path. Modal provides companies with a skill-based people blueprint to accumulate the right skill sets for technical career paths.

“Leading companies are turning to Modal to deliver more accountability and learning effectiveness into their talent strategies. Modal’s structure, coaching, and ultimately human connection helps build resilient teams with mastery of the skills needed to thrive in our changing world,” said Darren Shimkus, Modal Co-Founder and CEO.

“Building mastery requires a complex set of activities, including self-study, live discussions, exercises, and more,” said Josh Bersin, Global Industry Analyst. “I’m excited to see Modal build a platform focused on integrating all these important actions into a scalable and complete experience.”

Modal’s first offering helps data professionals build the skills critical to succeeding in the modern world, and helps deliver data literacy across an entire company. Employees travel through a series of 8-week learning experiences with a cohort of 30-40 fellow learners who collaborate on projects, form teams in live events, and ultimately build skills and meaningful connections as part of a community. With Modal’s learning journeys, every employee has the structure they want to build the skills they need.

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We Learn Together with Modal

With COVID’s disruption of the enterprise learning ecosystem and no more face to face interaction in the foreseeable future, Publicis Sapient could no longer rely on traditional learning tools to do the upskill employees and let’s face it, Zoom fatigue is real. On top of managing a remote workload, employees found it difficult to carve out time for self-paced learning. Left to their own devices, learning felt like a daunting task without enough structure, with little incentive to complete.

“Cohort learning with clear accountability and structure is where the magic is for our employees. However, this is hard for us to scale and operationalize, especially using Publicis Sapient subject matter experts,’ said Ian Stevens, Head of Capability Learning & Development for North America at Publicis Sapient. “With Modal, employees learn with a cohort of peers organized into 8 week programs called Journeys. Modal offers us more control and visibility over the talent process to rapidly upskill employees with critical technical skills in key roles at scale.”

Publicis Sapient turned to the Modal Mastery platform to help employees build the skills to thrive in the new world of work.

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