Catalyte raised an additional $1.5M in Series A funding. Its CEO discusses its expansion and platform upgrade

Thanks to a round led by an education-focused growth equity investor and workforce learning companies, Catalyte is using funding to enhance its AI platform and expand into the public sector market. With a target goal of $5 million, the technology workforce training company has already secured $3.2 million in its ongoing Series A funding round.

While Green Street Impact Partners played a leading role as an investor in this continued round, Catalyte’s management team and some of its previous investors also participated, as the company confirmed to Technical.ly via email. “According to the company, the funds will support ongoing efforts to optimize Catalyte’s AI-powered reskilling platform, leverage the latest technological advancements, scale apprenticeships in sales and cybersecurity and expand the public sector business — both within Maryland and in other states.

Catalyte announced this about nine months after it finished the acquisition of The Agency Shop, a digital marketing company.

In a prior interview with Technical.ly, Catalyte CEO Matt Derella, a former Twitter executive, said that the company was “doubling down on Baltimore and building out the community.” He reiterated that enthusiasm in a recent interview, citing how Green Street has several staffers connected to the Baltimore area.

“As it relates, we’re very excited to continue to be part of the Baltimore community,” he said. “And I think working with Green Street is the benefit of getting people who have unbelievable expertise on a national and global level but also have roots in the Baltimore region, where I think Catalyte is an important company and positioned to become, maybe, a model for how companies from Baltimore, startups and entrepreneurial efforts in Baltimore, can lead to really great outcomes.”

Derella, who took the tech workforce developer’s top spot back in December 2022, further chimed in on the company’s continued Series A round, its goals and his excitement to be in Baltimore’s entrepreneurial landscape in this Q&A. The transcript of the interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about Green Street Impact and how it was the right choice as an investor. Is it offering anything outside of capital that the company is excited about?

Yeah, Green Street Impact is really an ideal partner for us. It really doesn’t start with capital. It starts with values. This is an organization and a group of executives who deeply understand the mission that Catalyte is on to help millions of people move into 21st-century jobs, and to provide that pathway. They are aligned with that impact. And they bring deep expertise from across the education, workforce space, as well as the financial space, to really partner with us.

In an earlier email, Technical.ly asked who led the round. In addition to Green Street Capital, it also said that the Catalyte management team and some of your previous investors participated. Could you elaborate on that?

Sure. I would just say there: This is an opportunity. I joined about nine months ago for us to do a round that got management invested in the company personally, and got our existing investors the opportunity to continue to double down on the company — and to bring in some really amazing expertise from a company like Green Street who has a very sharp shared vision for where the company is going.

With this funding raise, it appears that Catalyte is focused on enhancing its AI-powered reskilling platform and leveraging recent technological advancements. Could you provide more details about this platform and the specific technological advances Catalyte aims to use in this round?

It’s never been a more exciting time to be applying data to solving big important problems. We have the good fortune to have, in this space, applying machine learning to basically uncover talent, where many people aren’t even looking at helping train that talent and put them into amazing tech jobs. The advances in AI and, frankly, some of the additions we’ve made such as Jun Wang, — who’s the CTO, who comes from Google and Twitter and has deep expertise in AI and machine learning — we see an opportunity to take a very winning formula for us and really supercharge it with the latest technology to help us get even more advanced. To delivering more value both to employers, who we’re helping sort of discover talent for and solve big digital transformation problems for, as well as for potential employees.

In a previous email, you mentioned the emergence of new job opportunities in light of recent technological advancements, particularly in AI. Additionally, it appears that you are expanding apprenticeships in sales and cybersecurity. Could you provide more details about these developments?

Our role, I think, is to understand where employers have needs, both on a sort of a technological front so we can come in and actually help them solve digital transformation issues, but also from an employment standpoint, like what are the jobs that they can’t fill? And when you look at the market today, I think there’s a tremendous amount of need, hopefully because of AI in cybersecurity. We see that as a trend that will continue, and roles like sales, management, these are evergreen roles. There’re always going to be companies that need talented people that can lead those roles, and we’re seeing that that’s also a really compelling value proposition to employers because they can see the value of adding really talented people right away. So we are always looking to find the right next thing for us as it relates to our apprenticeship program. And right now, the combination of our sort of core technological training, working in Python and working across many of Microsoft’s different tech stacks, as well as cyber and sales are really powerful.

I’d also mention: Digital is another one where we’ve had a lot of success. … We also recently struck the partnership with the 4As, which is the American Association of Advertising Agencies, where we’re the exclusive apprentice partnership to them. And that’s what we’re focused on. We’re always looking and talking to employers about where are their needs, and how can we potentially be their solution by applying data to helping them uncover the best talent. To us, it’s interesting that for most employers, the human capital costs are always in the top one or two or three line items in terms of investment for most companies. It’s also always at the top of the CEOs’ agenda for any given year, yet there’s very little data science and AI that’s been applied to really refining the approaches there, and we are gonna change that.