Ghent-based uman.ai raises €500K to map employees’ work skills

The Belgian startup uman.ai, whose software helps teams to share skills more efficiently, has just announced raising €500K. The round was led by imec.istart, Skyhaus (parent company of a.o. ML6) and Roel Naessens (ex-Google), and additionally, the startup received innovation grants from VLAIO. With the funds raised, uman.ai wants to develop its platform further and set up a high-performance go-to-market strategy.

Uman.ai, founded in 2019, helps teams increase collaboration and share skills. The idea behind uman.ai came from the statistic that employees spend over 4.5 hours a week repeating mistakes that colleagues have already made. Companies possess a lot of knowledge distributed amongst their employees, but they lack the tools to make that knowledge visible. Uman.ai’s AI-driven knowledge platform, based on deep learning algorithms, that maps the skills of all employees in a company, creating a good overview of all knowledge and skills present on the work floor. Uman.ai is a solution that works out of the box, with no integrations required, meaning that any company can get started immediately.

Co-founder Charles Boutens says: “Research shows that 30% of employee turnover is due to the poor match between the tasks and skills and personal interests of the employee. With our platform we want to make it possible for teams to share information more easily so that employees gain a greater insight into their own competences and thus develop new skills themselves”.

Uman.ai has been going now for one year, and is part of imec.istart’s acceleration programme. Alongside imec.istart and Skyhaus, Roel Naessens has contributed to the capital injection of €500K as well. Uman.ai has also received an innovation grant from VLAIO. Additionally, Naessens will assist uman.ai in the development of a high-performance go-to-market strategy. 

“The fact that imec.istart and Skyhaus are reinvesting as original investors means that they believe in our story and our product,” says Charles Boutens. “We notice that there is a need in the market and that our product offers a solution. Now it’s a question of further developing our platform and setting up a strong go-to-market strategy. With Roel Naessens on board, we already have the right man in the right place for this”.