Talespin raises $20M to train workers using spatial technologies
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Talespin has raised $20 million in funding for its task of using virtual reality and augmented reality — or spatial technologies — to train people to do work.
The company became famous a few years ago for a virtual reality demo designed to teach managers how to fire a hapless worker named Barry. While that sounds callous, it was really more about how to emotionally handle difficult tasks at work, and it conveyed how to do it in a gentle way.
Talespin previously raised $15 million back in 2019, and it has been further developing extended reality (XR) — using technologies such as virtual reality and augmented reality — for enterprise training, said Talespin CEO Kyle Jackson, in an interview with GamesBeat.
“We had just raised money going into the pandemic and we had the ability to navigate the uncertainty,” Jackson said. “We immediately started having conversations that [spring of 2020] where everything we had been saying went from frontier tech to more foundational tech. I wasn’t having to sell and convince people of this anymore, as the utility seemed so obvious.”
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During the pandemic, Talespin has learned that companies are willing to pay for VR and AR training because it’s often cheaper than sending poorly prepared workers into real-life situations with expensive enterprise or industrial equipment. And because they can’t train people so easily with remote work conditions.
Instead of building content internally, the company shifted to making tools for enterprises to build their own applications more quickly.
“We moved to become a true platform play, and we released this no-code authoring
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