Romania-born human intelligence platform Nestor, announced a $2 million seed round. Lead investor, Eleven Ventures has been an early backer and key part of scaling into the global markets of companies such as Payhawk and Gtmhub in verticals like fintech and the future of work.
“Every employee is unique. We envision a world where every employee receives the right opportunity at the right time to continually learn and improve the skills that will help them succeed. We help organizations make an impact on each employee’s development and enable HR people leaders to build agile people strategies that move beyond the traditional job approach by placing skills at the front and center of their talent operations” Bogdan Apostol, CEO of Nestor, said in a statement.
Bogdan Apostol and Raluca Apostol started Nestor out of their desire to help every employee grow based on their unique needs, skills and capabilities. While being people managers, they often found themselves struggling to identify the right development opportunities for their people so that they could keep them engaged and enable them to perform at the highest potential. Nestor has Romanian founders but just like UiPath, the developer of robotic process automation (RPA) software, its HQ is in the US.
Nestor is now trusted by HR and people leaders in the most forward-thinking mid-to-large enterprises, including Fortune 500 companies, across Europe, North America, and Latin America.
“Bogdan and his team are reimagining the multi-billion dollar people analytics and talent software market by offering workforce visibility over non-linear assets such as employee skills and capabilities, engagement, performance, culture, and career mobility in an effortless and codified way,” stated Vassil Terziev, managing partner at Eleven Ventures. “We are thrilled to join Nestor’s journey to deliver an end-to-end people intelligence platform to support organisations worldwide.”
This funding round will enable Nestor to grow its sales and customer success teams and accelerate expansion on the newly entered US and Latin America markets with a focus on mid-to-large enterprises. The startup will further invest in product innovation and plans to launch the smart career pathing module so that employees can easily explore what are the alternative paths they can take in their careers and the types of skills they should focus on in the next period.
In Greek mythology, Nestor was king of the city of Pylos. In Homer’s The Iliad, Nestor is fighting against Troy with the Greeks. While Nestor is too old to play a large part in battle, his character is essential to The Iliad because he helps to keep alive the history of his people, he advises and motivates the people around him, and he moves the plot of the story forward.
