2023-10-17 06:47:00
The image of the manager of a VSE or SME with his nose to the wheel, managing emergency following emergency without ever taking the time to step back or train is often the one applied to this category of companies. In addition to the complex and time-consuming procedures required to train employees, these SMEs do not always know their rights. It was on this observation that Jean-Marie Dupré and Stéphane Silvi made to create Matchers in 2019, in Montpellier. The startup has just raised 2 million euros to boost the deployment of its solution.
« More than 70% of VSE-SMEs never train due to lack of time and because they cannot find a suitable training offer for support functions such as marketing, sales, HR, management or communication.observes Jean-Marie Dupré, who was HR director for around fifteen years before creating Matchers. In general, the training they find on the market is theoretical, collective and face-to-face, rather inter-company… In general, they do not have either the network or the financial resources to train, and the procedures are so complex and time-consuming that they end up giving up, even though they have contributed to obtain training funding! It is for these reasons that Matchers offers an innovative and very concrete approach to training, targeting companies that employ fewer than 50 employees and do not have in-house HR. »
Skill pools
“We wanted to develop solutions that meet their needs by removing obstacles: source funding and activate it for them, and find the best expertise to offer them a tailor-made training course, explains Jean-Marie Dupré. For this, we have platformed a community of 650 experts who work in companies and who provide training in parallel. Because this is the other observation that we made: there are reservoirs of untapped skills in companies, experts in their field who want to pass it on. We have now brought together a community of 650 experts across France… Matchers has been a Qualiopi certified training organization since 2021, and all our training courses are eligible for funding. We offer tailor-made solutions: the client does and learns by working directly on their own business projects. And 80% of the training is distance learning, which allows them to be sequenced into short modules, two hours per week for example, so as to be easily absorbable for small businesses. »
According to the economic model established by Matchers, the startup guarantees financing for the customer from financing organizations (with a possible remainder payable) and the sharing of wealth, the cost of training paid by the financing organization, is distributed among equal share between the expert and Matchers.
Boost the sales team
Matchers claims to have accompanied 300 companies to train their teams, including “75% had never implemented training before “. The startup, incubated at the Village by CA in Montpellier and today within the Via Innova incubator in Lunel (Hérault), employs 23 employees. After a turnover of 600,000 euros in 2022, Matchers is targeting one million euros in 2023.
The company has just completed its first fundraising, i.e. 1 million euros in equity from IRDI Capital Investissement and 1 million euros in bank debt with the Banque Populaire du Sud and the Caisse d’Epargne. Objective : ” Develop our product, particularly on the automation of obtaining financing, the customer and expert journey. And at the same time, to boost commercial development, we are structuring the sales team. Our workforce should increase to around thirty by the end of 2024. Currently, we are recruiting a business developer and an IT developer ».
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