AG5, the SaaS platform used to map and track employees’ skills and qualifications, has raised €6 million in a new round of investment. Last year, the company received €1.2 million from tech investor Peak. Since then, its annual revenue has tripled. Now, together with SaaS experts Headline and Acadian Ventures, Peak is investing in AG5 once more.
AG5’s SaaS solution offers the first interface that organisations can use to map and track employees’ skills that are directly linked to production lines. It delivers scalable capacity planning and insights for audits and training programmes to industries that still rely on Excel, or pen and paper. Its plug-and-play software solution simplifies skills management with intuitive, appealing, and shareable skill matrices. Its clients report an 80 per cent reduction in audit preparation times and 15 per cent savings on employee training budgets.
With offices in Amsterdam and Berlin, and a workforce of 31 employees, the company addresses a global market potentially worth €28 billion. The new investment will therefore be used to further internationalise the platform, starting in Europe’s manufacturing powerhouse, Germany. Over the next two years, the company aspires to double the size of its team, triple its client base, and become the European market leader in skills management.
In manufacturing, neglecting to map essential skills of front-line workers properly and in a timely manner results in myriad problems on production floors. It can lead to reduced productivity, safety violations, and a lack of insight into valuable information that is necessary for audits.A shortage of qualified staff is increasing year-after-year as a result of rapid technological developments, increased turnover, and an ageing workforce. A 2022 ManpowerGroup survey, for example, shows that 76 percent of manufacturing employers report difficulties finding the required skills. The problem is so severe that the European Commission has named 2023 the European Year of Skills, marked by an investment of €85 billion into the development of digital skills on the production floors. To navigate this challenge, international organizations such as Jacobs Douwe Egberts, Air France-KLM, Tata Steel, and Toyota Boshoku are using AG5 to map and track their employees’ skills.