Why we invested in Retorio
When I first met Patrick and Christoph, the co-founders of Retorio, in their Munich office earlier this year, it didn’t take long to understand the potential that can be unleashed when applying AI and Behavioral Intelligence to employee training.
Retorio is building an operating system for Learning & Development (L&D), enabling large enterprises to train their employees at scale by creating their own training workflows with video simulations.
Technology shifts, shorter product cycles, and new market conditions require companies to react fast to competition and to train their teams quicker and more efficiently than ever before. And this is where Retorio comes into play: their video-based AI coach enables employees to identify and train successful behaviors, which is key to successfully driving transformation and responding to competing environments.
Solving a complex problem within the L&D market
At SquareOne, we look for founders who solve complex problems in huge markets. But in this case, we truly believe that the company can create a completely new market: with Retorio, companies can identify completely new performance standards and roll them out across their entire organization.
Breaking down some of the problems in this market:
- Training is very much siloed and decoupled from employees’ workflows.
- It takes time, effort, and money to train employees (and to really change behaviors at scale),
- it is difficult to train all employees to the same standard of quality while addressing personalized skill gaps and needs,
- and it’s almost impossible to show a clear ROI.
Companies worldwide are tackling these problems by investing in L&D software and tooling. According to Future Market Insights, the market for sales coaching software will grow from $47.6bn in 2022 to $88.7bn in 2032. Let’s just take the example of Siemens: the company invested a total of €165m in L&D last year, which amounts to an average of €573 per employee.
Building a scalable AI coaching platform to identify winning behaviors (at the right time)
With Retorio, companies can identify and train the most successful behaviors and patterns to significantly improve performance. By performance, we mean faster closing speed, improved conversion rate and upsell, but also better customer service and less churn.
So how does it actually work?
- First, a virtual training session is created to simulate a customer conversation.
- During the video session, the employee interacts with the avatar to go through the real-life scenario.
- Retorio’s AI coach will not only analyze what the person says but how they say it and is able to identify and benchmark winning behaviors and patterns.
- The employee receives personalized feedback and recommended training sessions to improve their next customer interaction.
By integrating with the CRM, Retorio knows which training is necessary for which employee at which time and can automatically trigger a training to prepare a sales rep ahead of a client meeting. And we finally have a clear ROI: imagine being able to backtrack better sales conversion or progression speed in your CRM to a specific training session.
This is what makes it so exciting: Retorio’s AI technology unlocks new growth potential for companies that is hardly used today. Cost- and time-effective training, high scalability (companies create a workflow within minutes instead of train-the-trainer methods), direct L&D cost savings (no in-person trainers), and standard training quality across geographies.
Targeting large enterprises in disruption
Retorio can be used by any enterprise with large teams across the globe. But specifically, companies in disruptive markets with new incumbents shaking up the market: we’re talking Automotive, Insurance, Telco, Retail, Logistics — just to name a few. Retorio can help reps sell a new EV and simulate potential technical questions regarding the improved battery range. But also to outline specific features versus a competitor EV manufacturer with a similar model.
However, sales is only one exemplary use case for Retorio. Their platform is already being used by customer service, after-sales, or leadership; anywhere in the company where employees have interactions with customers, partners, or suppliers. Already today, Retorio’s customers include 5 of the 10 market leaders and most profitable publicly listed companies in Germany as well as large international enterprises across Europe and the US.
A perfect team with exciting times ahead
Behind this successful story is a complimentary duo: Patrick Oehler and Christoph Hohenberger, together with their world-class team based in Munich.
What they both have in common is their authenticity and deep knowledge about the matter: Christoph and Patrick met at university and spent many years studying behavioral psychology and AI at world-renowned universities.
We are very excited to join this exceptional team on their journey and to lead Retorio’s €9m Series A round together with Storm Ventures from the US and Porsche Ventures.
Welcome to the SquareOne family, Retorio!
🚀 PS: Retorio is hiring at the moment; check out their open positions here.
