Edison Partners is leading a $4 million growth round in Northpass, a Parsippany-based enterprise learning solution for driving business performance, the growth equity investment firm will announce Wednesday morning.
The capital will be used to accelerate Northpass’ go-to-market execution and product innovation to transform the $5 billion learning management system category.
Tom Vander Schaaff, general partner of Edison Partners, led the investment and will join the company’s board of directors.
He said the investment makes sense in today’s world.
“Enterprise learning solutions are a large and fast-growing market,” he said. “One of the key advantages Northpass has established is its unique degree of understanding of the market’s new needs and the development of user-centric designed programs, experiences and metrics. The Northpass team’s approach has quickly converted into solid revenue growth and bookings momentum.
“We are excited to be working with (CEO) Steve Cornwell and his team to accelerate the company’s market expansion, further differentiate its platform, and help Northpass to continue to scale into new verticals.”
Northpass experienced significant momentum in 2018 as it grew its customer base to more than 200 logos including notable disruptor brands such as Airbnb, Lyft, Uber, Shopify and Square. Northpass officials said the company achieved 100% revenue growth for the year and anticipates the same 2X growth trajectory for 2019.
Northpass officials said the company’s platform is currently used by large- and mid-sized Software-as-a-Service businesses as well as brands in the on-demand sector, where flexible and distributed learning programs and analytics are in high demand. Northpass officials feel they provide a nimble, modern solution, focused around content-building, content-delivery and a mobile-first learning experience.
Northpass said it is building a new LMS category that will let companies create and deliver content via browser or mobile to train their employees, customers and partners on their brand, product and best practices. Northpass officials said it will be able to offer online programs design-optimized for learners and customized for customers’ needs beyond compliance, resulting in better engagement, active participation, knowledge transfer and retention.
“We purpose-built our platform to serve a new generation of corporate customers looking for a modern and flexible learning solution that delivers the necessary insights to achieve their business goals,” Cornwell said.
“This partnership with Edison provides us with both the capital and operating expertise to grow our team, accelerate our up-market growth and continue to strengthen our competitive position.”
Edison Partners has financed and guided more than 200 private companies, a third of which have been in the enterprise solutions space. Northpass is the firm’s 47th investment in its home state of New Jersey. In addition to Northpass, the firm’s current investments in New Jersey include Scivantage, Trialscope and Zelis Healthcare.
Edison’s current enterprise solutions portfolio includes All Traffic Solutions, Blue Medora, Bricata, Emplify, ExecVision, GAN Integrity, Giant Oak, Jornaya, Northpass, NS8, PathFactory, Terminus, Sigstr, and Zagster. Notable exits in the sector include Archive Systems, Billtrust, eSentire, InSoft, ItemMaster, Logfire, NetProspex, Notable Solutions, Operative, Salsa Labs, Tangoe, Telarix, VirtualEdge, Uptivity, and VFA.
