The Bunch app helps you become a better leader. Investing in it was a no-brainer.

Companies are spending billions of euros on training their employees. However, numerous classes and workshops often tend to be inefficient for many professionals. Bunch is a new tool, helping employees in a way that in-person classes and workshops could from a certain perspective never match. The app is an AI-powered pocket coach, which helps people to become better members of their respective workspace every single day. Its main specialty is to create new leaders and upgrade the skills of the already leading. This unique startup as of now managed to acquire 2.2 million euros. The most recent investment round was backed by the forefront of the European investment funds, among them the angel investor company DEPO Ventures.

Bunch is a service primarily oriented toward millennial managers and aspiring beginner leaders. It combines education in periodically occurring 2-minute sessions, with a personalized spin based on the data of your own style of leadership. It creates exclusive content from world-renowned leaders, which helps managers build a routine to increase team-leading potential. All the advice provided by the app is based on extensive psychology-oriented research as well as empirical knowledge and a number of specialized interviews. “We are fully aware of the limits of face-to-face coaching. If we want to reach every manager in the world, it is much more efficient to utilize technology to do so. Therefore this is exactly how to bring high-quality tools for personal growth to everyone, everywhere.” (Darja Gutnick, CEO, and co-founder of Bunch)

With its mission to become the best platform for the advancement of professionals, Bunch spiked the interest of the Czech investment group DEPO Ventures, which currently has a rising portfolio of over two dozen tech companies. “The self-learning market has had an upward spike for a while now. Moreover, companies started to spend larger amounts of money on employee training, so that they are better prepared for leading roles. This creates the potential for companies, which deal with the education of corporate leaders. Besides that, the company consists of an extraordinary team, and its founders were a part of several successful startups even before Bunch. Not to mention their experience with organizational psychology, coaching, and conflict resolution.” (Jan Krahulík, partner of angel funds DEPO Ventures explains the reasoning behind the investment)

Technology that surpasses face-to-face coaching

The AI leadership coach which is now available on the App Store has its Android version release planned for next year. Buch was created in 2017 and the founders were originally planning to focus their product only on the companies themselves. Later though, they realized the massive potential of targeting their product toward individual professionals. The startup aims to launch premium features that are supposed to boost virality and drive the company to its first 100k users in 2022. Bunch, however, does not intend to stop there.

There has been a considerable amount of interest in the investment round for Bunch, and so the founders were able to choose strategically among their investors. “DEPO Ventures holds together a large number of angel investors, those that are experienced with the corporate world while understanding the issues we face on a very individual level. They are more than able to help Bunch with the shift from a B2C to a B2B business model. Our original vision is still as strong as at the very start of our project, and we are certain that DEPO is going to be an important element in the journey toward the success of our service.  We aim to become the best possible platform for professional growth.” (Anthony Reo, co-founder and operational director at Bunch)

Besides DEPO Ventures, the concurrent investment round was joined by shareholders M13, Atlantic Labs, and MHV. The round was also accompanied by the venture capital funds 7percent Ventures and the Scandinavian fund Inventure. Many angel investors were onboarded too, with past investments in successful companies such as Netflix, Oura, Google, Airbnb, and Wise.