Today, one of our most recent portfolio companies, Opus, announced its rebrand as well as their $2M seed round.

At NextView, we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about various personas of the Everyday Worker, and we have always felt that there is an opportunity to leverage technology to broaden access for mass market workers. Companies from supply chain to manufacturing to services employ over 110 million frontline workers in the U.S., yet there isn’t a product out there that is effective at helping this workforce acquire skills and stay ahead. These companies have long had ongoing training needs to ensure that their employees stay safe and keep performance up, while legacy learning management systems are marred with low engagement in this employee segment.

Enter Opus, an employee training and engagement platform that brings the frontline workforce forward into the new era of work. Opus equips frontline workers with the necessary skills to perform and grow, while helping their managers and executives increase productivity and better develop their people for the long-run.

One of Opus’ unique insights is to deliver text-based, bite-size interactive training to meet the frontline workers where they are – out and about on their phone with pockets of free time between shifts. Even though it’s still early, its product has been able to deliver unprecedented user engagement numbers that are consistently at 85% and higher – no small feat for any product but especially impressive for this user segment given the constant on-the-go nature of their jobs.

When we first met Rachael Nemeth and learned about Opus, we were impressed both by the product engagement metrics and her product insights around the best way to deliver high-impact training to frontline workers. A certified ESL instructor who has been on the frontline herself in numerous kitchen and operational roles, she knows both training delivery and her audience intimately well. This allowed them to design a conversational-based learning experience that is enthusiastically received by both the frontline workers and their managers. Rounding out the founding team is Jeff Silver, who brings software and product leadership after years of engineering leadership experience at Managed by Q.

Opus started out by delivering workplace English training and quickly expanding into COVID-19 safety/hygiene training over the past few months, and its customers are asking for more. With this round of funding, Opus is broadening its training offering to include food safety, workplace safety, inventory and production, sexual harassment, and more to fullfill the long-term, ongoing training need across a frontline employee’s lifecycle. We couldn’t be more excited to be partnering with the Opus team to become the training and upskilling companion throughout the lifecycle of every frontline employee.