AG5, a SaaS platform used to map and track employees’ skills and qualifications, recently announced that it has raised €6 million in a fresh funding round led by Peak, Headline and Acadian Ventures. The Dutch startup will use the investment to expand its international reach, starting in Europe’sEurope’s manufacturing powerhouse, Germany. Over the next two years, AG5 aspires to double the size of its team, triple its client base, and become the European market leader in skills management.
Founded in 2019 by brothers Mathieu van Echtelt, Rick Van Echtelt, and Wouter Gazendam, AG5 enables organizations to identify, visualize, and close skills gaps – without using complicated and inconvenient spreadsheets. The platform offers the first interface organizations can use to map and track employees’ skills directly linked to production lines. It delivers scalable capacity planning and insights for audits and training programs to industries that still rely on Excel or pen and paper. The firm’s plug-and-play software solution simplifies skills management with intuitive, appealing, and sharable skill matrices. AG5’s clients report an 80% reduction in audit preparation times and 15% savings on employee training budgets.
Speaking about the company, Co-founder & CEO of AG5, Rick van Echtelt, said:
Organizations need help to maintain an overview of which frontline workers are qualified to operate a certain tool or work in a certain production line. They use large HR systems, but this software is not built for skills management. So each company builds its own spreadsheets. It’s cumbersome, doesn’t scale, and is prone to error. We help organizations get rid of these and offer them a turnkey skill management solution that integrates with the software they use already.
With offices in Amsterdam and Berlin, the startup offers technical integrations with multiple parties in HRM, e-learning, planning systems, and learning management systems, including SAP, Moodle, and Cornerstone. It counts Air France KLM, Tata Steel, Jacobs Douwe Egberts and Toyota Boshoku amongst its customers – serving factories from 200 to 40,000 employees. The company addresses a global market potentially worth €28 billion.
Commenting on the funding, General Partner of Acadian Ventures, Thomas Otter, said:
We really want to invest in companies where our operator experience and network can add value to the founder. AG5 is right in our sweet spot. They saw the opportunity to build a product to solve the matching and record keeping at a manufacturing plant level better than excel could. It doesn’t replace the time and attendance systems but augments them. It is very sticky, and it is really ready to scale internationally.
Jonathan Becker, General Partner at Headline, also commented on the latest development:
Rick, Mathieu, and Wouter are putting skills at the centre of the workforce, regardless of how large the team or the industry might be. They have built something unique that their solution’ssolution’s fast growth largely comes from inbound sales. Not only do they make manufacturing more efficient, compliant, and less wasteful – they also help blue-collar workers up-skill their careers.
In May 2022, AG5 raised €1.2 million in a funding round led by Peak, a European venture capital fund based in Amsterdam, Berlin, and Stockholm.
