Talespin, an immersive solutions provider, gained considerable renown for a virtual reality (VR) demo instructing managers on how to improve their employee firing skills. The company has now raised funding of $15 million for advanced extended reality (XR) development, through the use of augmented reality (AR) and VR for purpose specific Enterprise training.
Cornerstone OnDemand, a Cloud-based learning software provider, has led the round of funding and declared a partnership with Talespin for delivering the XR developer’s training solutions to its customers. HTC has also entered as a new investor in this round with existing investors such as Farmers Insurance Exchange participating.
Talespin has understood that AR and VR training will successfully attract companies as they are more affordable options compared to delegating real-life tasks for ill-prepared works, where they have to handle costly industrial and enterprise equipment.
In an email, Kyle Jackson, the CEO of Talespin, remarked that an increasing number of organizations are utilising XR-based solutions for employee training. He elaborated further on the topic, saying that due to NLP and AI progresses, his company predicts that the technology will be harnessed across the employee lifecycle to practice and evaluate important skills. Jackson emphasized that skills such as leadership and communication are quite necessary in modern workplaces, but are difficult to evaluate and train.
Numerous companies are confronted with considerable reskilling hurdles whilst seeking to remould their workplaces, to measure up to dynamic technology changes, expanding talent gaps and changing expectations. There is an acute shortage of communication and leadership skills as workplaces around the world are growing digital. It is also changing process-driven jobs at a rate faster than what conventional training needs.
Talespin has said that these hurdles are addressed by enabling companies to methodically prepare their workforce for a fresh, skills-based economy powered by spatial computing. The Runway platform by Talespin speeds up hard and soft skills learning and makes advanced skills’ data available for facilitating goal-driven employee career decisions, and enhanced organization-level talent decisions.
The virtual reality (VR) training content from Talespin will be offered to customers as a part of Cornerstone’s product range. The Talespin Runway platform is set to undergo integration with the Learning Management System of Cornerstone to fuel development of XR training and analytics-based skill matching on a larger scale. Farmers Insurance, one of the early customers of Talespin, has also made an investment in the company after it observed the positive training results.
The new funding has raised the total funding amount gathered by Talespin to $20 million. The funds gained will be utilised by Runway, in addition to growing its VR leading content library, and also for expanding R&D efforts.
Talespin, co-founded by Jackson in 2015, currently has a workforce of 100 employees. Farmers Insurance has continually made investments for virtual reality and other technologies to march ahead of competitors. It has also unveiled a new training centre in Phoenix, Arizona, housing cutting-edge AR and VR hardware. Farmers has already collaborated with Talespin to create a soft skills programme featuring a virtual AI human. Tim Murray, head of claims shared services, Farmers Insurance, said that the new technology enables them to enhance essential workplace skills through effective practice sessions.
