Belgian startup Whale lands € 1 million to help SME deliver better employee onboarding and training

Whale, the knowledge and training platform for SMEs, raises EUR 1 million from Volta Ventures, Peak Capital, and the founding team. Founded by Bram Billiet and Gary Vanbutsele, Whale is on a mission to create the connected knowledge and training solution that replaces outdated learning methods.

The new funding will accelerate Whale’s global expansion and marketing initiatives. 

Whale is a SaaS company that helps teams centralize their processes, procedures, policies and tribal knowledge in one place, so they can onboard and train employees faster. As a web platform and web plugin, Whale empowers teams with bite-size training content, within the context of their work and delivered just-in-time. The company mainly focuses on service companies with knowledge workers and companies that use frameworks such as EOS® or Scaling up.

Sometimes it felt like all I did was repeat myself over and over again without real progress. I needed to find a more scalable and efficient way to empower my teams with the knowledge they required. 

Whale Co-Founder and CEO Gary Vanbutsele

Whale Co-Founder and CEO Gary Vanbutsele previously led an IT services firm and knows how time-consuming educating employees the traditional way can get.

The Whale team is razor-focused on driving operational efficiency and effectiveness by delivering knowledge in the flow of work. As such, Whale drives digital transformation globally through process operationalization and speeds up onboarding, on-the-job training and best-practices sharing..

Koen De Waele, Venture Partner at Volta Ventures, explains his motivation to invest

Traditional learning and knowledge management solutions store information in siloed applications, which means adoption by employees is often poor. However, the solution of Whale provides context-aware knowledge within the tools a company uses: the right information for the right employee at the right time. Truly learning while doing in a very efficient way.

Adds Stefan Bary, Managing Partner at Peak Capital

With the funding, Whale will further improve their product and ramp-up their international sales and marketing efforts.

We are very excited to bring not one, but two experienced partners onboard that will empower us in our mission to help companies train and work more effectively.

Gary ends.

Volta Ventures provides (pre)seed and early-stage financing for software & internet companies that originate in the Benelux. Now investing from its second fund it has 100M euro’s under management. Next to capital, the fund’s team provides guidance to assist companies in growing from start-up to scale-up. The Volta team aims to make a substantial contribution to the portfolio companies by working with the founders and management to identify new markets and clients attract talent, provide advice and support, and help raise follow-on financing. 

Peak Capital is a venture capital fund set up by experienced entrepreneurs and capital to European fast-growing early-stage Marketplace, Platform, and SaaS companies. Peak Capital manages EUR 84 million and has made 30 investments to date including IENS (sold to TripAdvisor), Catawiki, United Wardrobe (sold to Vinted), Channable, Studocu, Trengo and Creative Fabrica.