ProFinda has received £1m in funding from Nesta Impact Investments, the venture capital arm Nesta, to accelerate the deployment of its platform across the private, public and third sector, and increase social impact.
Nesta Impact Investments aims to supports businesses which have the potential to deliver clear social impact as a part of their business model.
Formerly NESTA, National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, NESTA was established in 1998 with an endowment from the UK National Lottery and became an independent charity in 2012.
ProFinda’s technology is designed to help workplaces manage supply chains of people, and understand their collective skills so that work and projects can be directly matched to actual knowledge, capability, experience and skills.
It is used in a wide range of contexts including workforce resource management by global professional services partnerships, client network support by leading private banking organisations and network mobilisation by international disaster management bodies.
The Nesta investment will be used to make its technology available to non-profits and improve its proprietary ‘skills machine’ learning tech.
The firm uses its machine learning platform to understand the skills and knowledge of a company’s total workforce, based on a skills ‘ontology’, which utilises tools such as semantic parsing and matching to understand existing skills.
“Nesta Impact Investments has a strong track record of supporting businesses using cutting edge technology to develop novel approaches to emerging societal challenges.
“ProFinda is exploring two of our key areas of research – the future of work and collective intelligence.
“We want to continue to support organisations like ProFinda that are developing innovations that will uncover the hidden skills and capabilities across society and enable new ways of working.
Roger Gorman, ProFinda’s CEO, added: “People work better when their work makes the most of their skills and interests and builds in purpose.
“The challenge is that it’s all too easy for skills and interest to be wasted. Talent is hidden behind job titles or departmental walls.”