By Nancy Dahlberg
In the quest to build out the most innovative career platform for professionals, Teal announced today it has raised a $7.5 million Series A round of financing. The Miami-based startup plans to use the funding to expand its portfolio of advanced AI capabilities to give people the resources to thrive and grow in their careers.
The round was led by existing investors CityLight Capital and Flybridge, with participation from Rethink Capital Partners and Lerer Hippeau. In total, Teal has raised $19 million.
“Teal is designed to give people the tools to take ownership of their career, whether they’re just starting out in the workforce or looking to level up their salary. As an investor in Teal, we strongly support its mission and ability to put world-class products into the hands of consumers so they’re empowered to make informed, guided choices about what they see for their future,” said CityLight Capital Partner Jeff Rinehart.
Led by founder and CEO David Fano, Teal offers a suite of job search tools such as an AI Resume Builder, Job Tracker, Job Search Board, and Chrome Extension that help people to navigate their career journeys. Indeed, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor data, job seekers on average take 20.6 weeks to land a job.
The funding will help enable the five-year-old startup to become a multi-product company focused on their larger vision, explained Fano, in an interview with Refresh Miami. “A lot of what we’ve been focused on so far is the resume, but that’s not what we set out to do. We set out to help people for the entirety of the careers,” says Fano. “It’s tough as a small startup to try to have multiple products, but careers are episodic and people have these very specific pains that transition from one to the other. The new funding gives us the resources to do that.”
To that end, Teal also announced the launch of its AI Interview Coach, a tool that helps job seekers prepare for interviews to specific roles by simulating a two-way conversation with an AI agent.
“There are a lot of AI tools out there for interviewing that are prescriptive with the questions they ask, and we took an entirely different approach: You don’t know what you’re going to be asked – it’s fully immersive. We give it the job description, we give it your resume, and the AI formulates the questions, and you do it with your voice – it’s a simulation. You can see how you answered, and you can look at the transcript after the fact, but it’s much more realistic,” said Fano, adding that every time you practice you will get different questions. “People love it.”
Teal also unveiled AI-powered tools that help professionals understand and advocate for their worth. The new Offer Evaluation Tool provides a real-time, personalized analysis of any job offer by synthesizing data from similar roles and current market trends. “You upload your offer letter and materials, and that stuff’s really hard to understand. Say you’re a Gen Z worker and you’re a content creator on the weekends. Can I have a side hustle? Sometimes your employment agreement prevents those things. So now you can chat with it,” Fano said. The Negotiation Support Tool offers expert-crafted templates, email scripts, and guided support. Whether helping them secure a new offer or negotiate a raise, the tool is helping them leverage their own data, real-time market data, and Teal to help them make more money, Fano said.
Over the past year, Teal reports it has attracted more than 2 million members – including over 100,000 that pay for Teal Plus. Teal has presented millions of open relevant positions to them. And helped them land nearly 400,000 interviews to date. Teal has also enabled a 97% reduction in application preparation time, meaning a job seeker can complete an application in minutes. Teal’s members are primarily knowledge workers, Fano says, and about 30 percent of them live outside the United States.
Teal has a new Chief Technology Officer, Sumit Gupta, who brings over 20 years of experience building AI, voice, and fintech products at IBM and Oracle. All together, Teal’s fully remote team has 30 employees. Over the next year, Teal will be doing more hiring particularly for AI-specific engineering roles, said Fano, a Miami native. “We are always looking for good talent in Miami. Anything we can do to contribute to the Miami ecosystem and do some cool things to help people and help level the playing field, we’re here to do that.”
What’s next? Teal is focused on innovating what most would call the job board, but not one where employers pay to post on it, Fano said. “What we’re looking to do is find all the most compelling and interesting job opportunities out there, and not in any way be incentivized by who’s paying us to promote the job. We use AI to synthesize them and structure them so that people can do very specific searches, like ‘I want a product management job that’s fully remote and offers parental leave’. We’re working on that, and we’re doing a lot of cool things to find the opportunities and make it easier to apply for them.”
What excites Fano is AI’s role in the future of work. “The career is full of should haves: ‘I should have updated my resume. I should have kept in touch with my past co-workers’ It’s because life is busy and the career is unfortunately dealt with in this very reactive way. When thinking about products, I think about what are people who can afford it doing — the people who can pay for executive assistants who tend to their lives. AI agents will be able to do things for you at a fraction of the cost of a human being, and I think for the everyday consumer, that is going to be quite empowering.”
For instance, those AI agents could be looking for speaking opportunities for you, or identifying when you should ask for a raise or when you should think about adding skill sets and taking certain courses, Fano said. “The platform of career agents are doing work on your behalf, helping you grow your career because you’re busy dealing with life and you already have a job. The last five years have built us the foundation to be able to do that and I’m really excited for what’s ahead.”
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