Seattle’s Yoodli secures $40 million to expand AI learning, strengthen team
Yoodli, an AI communication coaching platform, raised $40 million in a Series B funding led by WestBridge Capital. The funds will help the company enhance AI capabilities, and follow a $13.7 million round raised in May.
Yoodli has raised $40 million in Series B funding led by WestBridge Capital, as the Seattle-based experiential learning platform strengthens its team and expands more aggressively into the enterprise market.
Existing US-based investors Neotribe and Madrona also participated in the round. This is the startup's second funding this year. In May, it had raised $13.7 million in a Series A round led by Neotribe.
The company will use the fresh funds mainly to bolster its AI coaching, analytics, and personalization capabilities. The Seattle-based startup will also expand its product, artificial intelligence (AI) research and customer success teams with the new funds.
“This round helps us scale our team and serve more enterprises on a true end-to-end experiential learning platform," Varun Puri, co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Yoodli, said in a prepared statement. “We’re reducing the time it takes to acquire real skills, ensuring employees are ready for game time, and saving organizations countless hours lost to passive coaching. The future of learning isn’t about consuming content—it’s about adaptive, real-world practice that drives behavioral change."
Modelling itself as an AI “roleplay" company, Yoodli acts as a communication coach, helping people become more confident when it comes to public speaking, sitting for interviews or even acting as a salesperson. The startup uses an artificial intelligence bot to devise real-world scenarios for people to train with, and then provides them with feedback that they can use to improve their communication skills.
It's also making a deeper push into the enterprise market, where Yoodli's bot is used for internal professional development, learning as well as helping go-to-market teams sell with confidence. The company counts several tech firms like Google, Databricks and Snowflake, sales training and development company Sandler Sales as well as AI cloud communications company RingCentral among its clients.
This is WestBridge Capital's fifth AI investment so far this year. In October, the firm led UnifyApps' $50 million Series B round. That month, it also led English language learning startup SpeakX's $16 million round, with Elevation Capital and Goodwater Capital also participating.
In April, WestBridge led a $60 million round in Tessel, an AI-native database-as-a-service platform, with Lightspeed Venture Partners participating in the round. Other deals include $40 million in Finbox for AI-driven credit infrastructure, and participation in Nexthop AI’s $110 million round led by Lightspeed.
In an earlier conversation with Mint, Rishit Desai, a partner at WestBridge who oversees investments related to AI and software-as-a-service, said that Indian AI startups would see a lot more growth-stage funding within the next 4-12 months. WestBridge is a global investment firm with $7 billion in assets under management and has backed several companies like ride-hailing unicorn Rapido, recently-listed edtech major Physics Wallah, insurance company Star Health and co-working solutions company IndiQube, which went public in July this year.
Yoodli's first round of funding was from Madrona and Cercano Management, which wrote the company a $6 million seed cheque back in 2021. With the new round of funding, the company has raised a total of $60 million.
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