Behind the UAE-based startup digitalising human skills

With over 50,000 workplace situations addressed by high-profile mentors – including female regional CEOs and Nobel Prize winners – Gleac almost immediately provides corporate employees with human skills-based-feedback on their everyday challenges.

As a woman in tech, Della Casa overcame funding and product-rolling hurdles to reach a level of success where Gleac will be powering the UAE Pavilion’s Jobs of the Future section at Expo 2020 Dubai.

In a wide-reaching interview with Arabian Business, Della Casa delves into the origins of the idea and what to expect from Gleac during the six-month-long global exhibition.

How did the idea for Gleac come about?

I think it’s from all of my work with people and particularly when I was with Careem, where we had a very young workforce.

There are many things that people just don’t have the life experience for and it’s not only the issue of age. Even if you’re older, the world and rules and things are shifting so quickly that we just don’t have the experience to be able to face those new situations where judgement and decision-making is needed.

Companies’ typical solution for this issue is referring their employees to their LMS system or online courses when all they want to do is to talk to somebody who’s been there and can say, “here’s what I would do in that situation”. If we had a couple of those people who we can be tapped into right away, just think of how quickly we’d be able to decide on how to resolve our human interaction-related work challenges.

Where and how did you launch?

I officially built my prototype in 2018 and the first company I shared it with was PwC. They looked at this tiny MVP I had built with $1,500 and said this is exactly what they need and they rolled out in December 2018.  I hired my first tech team in January 2019, in India, and we built the product.

I wanted to pilot it in an industry with high people-facing roles and rolled it out with Prada in September 2019, shortly before the pandemic started. They used Gleac to manage all the mental health checking in and upskilling for all their employees during the pandemic. They then recommended us to seven other high-end retailers.

Take us through your funding journey.

I bootstrapped up until last year and I’ve always had paying clients.

Coming from Careem, I already knew some of the big players in the market and when I reached out to them, their initial reaction was to give a valuation of $2m or $3m which is too low. In this part of the world, start-ups that do well are things that worked in other countries and have been adopted in the region.

So I chose to seek funding in the US with Juvo Ventures. They gave me a $10m valuation and agreed to lead my round. I’d have preferred funding from the region but, as a female in the region, I did not stand a chance to get the value that I know my product is worth.

I’ll be closing this round within this month and I’m trying to do so with local investors – now that the big funds here have seen a US venture fund leading, they are more interested.

I’ll then go for a full-fledged Series A in the second quarter of 2022. Hopefully, I do Expo right and that valuation will be two or three times what it is right now. I can set a regional example for building an IP at a world-class level from scratch and not copying and pasting.

What are your expansion plans and how will you be using the funds?

We’ll be completing our enterprise corporate SaaS platform. At Expo, we’ll be launching a business to consumer (B2C), which requires an entirely different team, so a lot of it will be for hiring the team for our B2C experience.

The third part of our funds is going to be building out and monetising our mentors for those who want to start giving one-on-one coaching or mentoring within the product.

What is your business model?

For B2B, our customers pay us $400 per employee per year. Once we launch the B2C, we are opening up everything for six months with no payment fee on the app.

Gleac will be part of the Expo 2020, in the section called Future is Human Pavilion of Dubai Cares, which will be entirely powered by Gleac.

What will be your involvement in Expo?

We will be part of the UAE government’s pavilion, in the section called Future is Human Pavilion, which will be entirely powered by Gleac. We created a taxonomy of 250 jobs of the future that don’t even exist yet and you get to see, in two minutes, whether you qualify for those jobs or not.

You then immediately get matched to one of our mentors and, through our app, get coaching to get ready for that job.

This is our largest contract to date and is paid for by the government. People often ask me why, as a startup in tech, I am not in Silicon Valley and my response always is that the opportunities that we get at the highest level in this region are not available anywhere else. The government here goes all out when they see a start-up that has the potential to put them on the map.

What profile of people are you targeting?

We look at companies that have high potential for women in very male-dominated industries, such as women in the oil and gas sector. Most women don’t have the network or are too afraid to show up and ask for help and so I have a product that can help them rise.

We also do well with frontline workers or those in high people-facing roles.

Finally, we unlock innovations within companies. Many large companies operate in silos and so our feedback loop unlocks all kinds of information within a company that they never knew about.

Why did you choose to focus on human skills?

I think we make a mistake many times because we wrongly assume credentials, titles and all of those things are what make us unique and special, but it’s actually the human skills that we all have.

If with Gleac, I give everyone the opportunity to show their quality of thought and human skills – regardless of their level of education, pedigree or nationality – then I have fulfilled my lifelong mission.