Dutch start-up AG5 raises €6 million for its skills management platform

Amsterdam-based start-up AG5 has announced a €6 million raise for its skills and training management platform for the manufacturing industry.

Peak, Headline and Acadian Ventures were involved in the funding round. 

“We really want to invest in companies where our operator experience and network can add value to the founder. AG5 is right in our sweet spot. They saw the opportunity to build a product to solve the matching and record keeping at a manufacturing plant level better than excel could. It doesn’t replace the time and attendance systems but augments them. It is very sticky, and it is really ready to scale internationally,” says Thomas Otter, General Partner at Acadian Ventures.

AG5 counts Air France KLM, Tata Steel, Jacobs Douwe Egberts and Toyota Boshoku amongst its customers - serving factories from 200 to 40,000 employees.

The plug and play platform maps workers' skills to asset types, bringing scalable and collaborative scheduling, forecasting, audits, and training to industries eliminating the need to tackle an Excel spreadsheet for employee CPD. 

AG5 was founded in 2019 by brothers Rick and Mathieu van Echtelt and Wouter Gazendam. They has been working on a a SaaS solution to manage fire brigade stations when they saw a gap in the market for a SaaS product to cater for the skills management of production line workers. 

“Organisations struggle to maintain an overview of which frontline workers are qualified to operate a certain tool or work in a certain production line. They use large HR systems, but this software is not built for skills management. So each company builds its own spreadsheets. It’s cumbersome, it doesn’t scale, and it’s prone to error. We help organisations get rid of these and offer them a turnkey skill management solution that integrates with the software they use already,” says Rick van Echtelt, CEO of AG5.

AG5’s platform is available in 21 languages, offers technical integrations with multiple parties in the field of HRM, e-learning, planning systems, and learning management systems, including SAP, Moodle, and Cornerstone.

“Rick, Mathieu, and Wouter are putting skills at the centre of the workforce, regardless of how large the team or the industry might be. They have built something so unique that their solution’s fast growth largely comes from inbound sales. Not only do they make manufacturing more efficient, compliant, and less wasteful - they also help blue-collar workers up-skill their careers.” says Jonathan Becker, General Partner at Headline.