doinstruct raises €7.6M to address frontline-worker skills shortages

July 16, 2024

• 80% of the global workforce are frontline workers in industries such as food processing, logistics & warehousing, hospitality, retail, healthcare and manufacturing. Current training options are time-consuming, inefficient and not designed with workers in mind.
• doinstruct’s simple, mobile-first approach is training as it should be – low-threshold, bite-sized and in the worker’s native language.
• doinstruct secured €7.6M in funding led by Creandum, with participation from existing investors HTGF (High-Tech Gründerfonds) and D11Z as well as Bastian Karweg (Founder Dealfront) and Andreas Hettich (Hettich Group).

Berlin (DE), July 16th, 2024: Europe is facing a jobs crisis driven by skills shortages and aging populations. Millions of people start a new job every year in key industries with inadequate onboarding and training. doinstruct today announces that it has secured €7.6m in a funding round led by Creandum, an early backer of Spotify, Klarna and Pleo, to address these challenges. 

According to a study earlier this year, three quarters of employers in 21 European countries could not find workers equipped with the right skills in 2023. Historically low unemployment rates coupled with declining birth rates is creating a jobs gap with immigration key to filling this gap in critical and highly regulated sectors such as food processing.

To date, frontline workers have been largely underserved by technology, trained mostly in a non-native language, in-person or using e-learning solutions not developed with the needs of these workers in mind. This is expensive for employers and makes compliance often hard to track which can have serious consequences in industries such as food processing where hygiene standards are critical, or in dangerous work environments.

doinstruct has built a mobile-first onboarding and training platform with the real needs of deskless workers front of mind. There is no app to download, no password to remember and no email required. All of the training content is continually updated in partnership with regulators and certifiers and currently available in more than 16 languages.

For employers, the platform provides unlimited usage of training packages and a high degree of automation, allowing them to set their training on ‘autopilot’ so it automatically repeats where needed for continuous learning. They can also record and upload their own content. A dashboard allows them to easily track and report training compliance. On average, doinstruct’s customers reach an adoption rate of >80% in the first month, have saved 4.6 hours of productive work per employee and reduced training costs by ~43%. 

I started my career restructuring large agricultural operations in the EU, where I was introduced to the world of warehouses and factories. And I worked closely with the unseen and underappreciated backbone of our country that powers same-day delivery, builds our cities, and puts food on the shelves. Like most companies, I trained our employees with time-intensive, face-to-face training that barely reached everyone. I needed the ability to train barrier-free, time- and language-independent, and compliant to meet fluctuating international demand in a multi-shift system. With doinstruct, we built the tool I wish I had back then.

Charlotte Rothert, CEO and Co-founder at doinstruct

doinstruct was founded in 2021 and is led by Charlotte Rothert, Daniel Marinkovic, Thorsten Groß, and Mona Feder. The company has seen significant traction in food, logistics and construction with more than 170 customers including well-known European brands such as Voelkel, Wiesenhof, Hengstenberg and Echterhoff, among others. doinstruct will use the funding to scale the product at a faster pace, expand internationally and enter new vertical sectors.

Our customers are facing a rising number of challenges. They are affected by increasingly tough regulatory requirements and labor shortages. Shift workers are difficult to reach, language barriers make compliant training and information delivery nearly impossible, and inevitable employee turnover requires ongoing, time-consuming retraining. I know we can do better. And it’s obvious that workers and industrial companies deserve better.

Charlotte Rothert, CEO and Co-founder at doinstruct

There are more than 2,7 billion frontline workers around the world that have been left behind by current training options. Doinstruct has built an incredible, easy-to-use product with the needs of these workers in mind and their customers love it. We see huge potential for them as they expand both across vertical sectors and internationally.

Simon Schmincke, General Partner at Creandum

About doinstruct
doinstruct is building the leading platform for frontline worker training. Backed by Creandum, HTGF and other investors, the company is well-positioned to continue scaling its product and team – as well as to become a category leader in frontline training software for midsize to enterprise level companies. To learn more about the doinstruct, visit: https://doinstruct.com/

About Creandum
Founded in 2003, Creandum is a leading pan-European early-stage venture capital firm. The firm’s portfolio of 150+ companies includes some of Europe’s most successful tech companies across a wide range of industries, including Spotify, Klarna, Depop, Trade Republic, Pleo, and neo4j. Today, every sixth company is a billion dollar company or more. Creandum’s advisory teams are based in Stockholm, London, Berlin, and San Francisco and offer extensive operational expertise to support the funds’ portfolio companies from seed to exit to become global category leaders. Learn more at www.creandum.com.

About High-Tech Gründerfonds  
The seed investor High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF) finances tech start-ups with growth potential and has supported more than 750 start-ups since 2005. In its four seed funds, HTGF has about 1.4 billion euros under management. Its team of experienced investment managers and start-up experts support young companies with expertise, entrepreneurial spirit and passion. HTGF’s focus is on high-tech start-ups in the fields of digital tech, industrial tech, life sciences, chemistry and related business areas. To date, external investors have injected about 6 billion euros of capital into the HTGF portfolio via more than 2,000 follow-on financing rounds. In addition, HTGF has already successfully sold shares in more than 180 companies.
Fund investors in this public-private partnership include the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, KfW Capital and 45 companies from a wide range of industries.

Media contact 
High-Tech Gründerfonds Management GmbH 
Tobias Jacob, Senior Marketing & Communications Manager  
T.: +49 228 – 82300 – 121
t.jacob@htgf.de