Training workshops or long emails about company policies tend to go in one ear and out the other.
A little Australian company, Looop (yes, three o’s), knows this, and it’s offering an alternative: online training courses that are easy to create and optimized for mobile. Today Looop is announcing a fresh $1.8 million ($2 million Austrilian dollars) from an undisclosed investor to keep growing and launch in the U.K.
Looop is part of a category of enterprise tools called “learning management systems,” which aim to take boring training workshops and manuals and put them on the computer screen. SuccessFactors and Oracle’s Taleo, for example, provide their own versions of that. Looop, however, seeks to make things less corporate by offering fun ways for managers to spice up their materials, like throwing in a YouTube video of a TED talk, sharing quotes from executives, or creating fun quizzes. It also offers real-time tracking of employees’ progress, insights into problem areas, and instant feedback capabilities (such as built-in comments on an employee’s answer to a question with the correct answer or additional details).
Thanks to its mobile-friendly design, Looop also makes it convenient for employees to get through the training materials when and where they like.
“With Looop, we’re addressing a large gap in the market. Companies often have the training content available to their employees — perhaps a product sheet or video — but don’t have an efficient and flexible platform from which to distribute it. We want to change that by providing a cost-effective and customisable product,” co-founder Ben Muzzell said in a statement.
In addition to work training, Looop can also be used to send updates to customers.
Along with its newly-launched Android app and expansion to the U.K., Looop plans on launching on iOS soon, going to the United States next month, and releasing an API in the next 12 months.
Looop was founded by Ben Muzzell and Daniel Gray and is based in Australia.
