Frontline employees work on their feet, and most course-based training waits for them at a computer. Bites builds training for them.
On October 29, the New York and Tel Aviv-based company announced a $40 million Series A round led by strategic investor PeakSpan Capital. It plans to use the money to grow in the U.S. and develop its platform.
“Running restaurants taught me that business performance comes down to what people do on the floor, every day, and whether they have the knowledge and support to do it well. We built Bites to put that support in every frontline employee’s hands,” said Eran Heffetz, co-founder and CEO of Bites.
Why Deskless Workers Miss Out on Training
Bites estimates the number of deskless employees at 2.8 billion. Few of them work at a computer, the company says, so training built around courses and learning management system (LMS) logins misses many of them.
Investors see the same gap. “Frontline employees make up approximately 80% of the global workforce, yet companies have historically had to stitch together tools designed for office workers because few solutions have been built with deskless workers specifically in mind,” said Phil Dur, co-founder and managing partner of PeakSpan Capital.
Sales and operations leaders feel the effect, the company says. A new promotion or procedure goes nowhere if frontline teams don’t act on it.
Short Lessons Reach Deskless Workers Through Messaging Apps
Bites’ answer is to send training through the messaging apps employees use at work. Lessons arrive on WhatsApp, SMS, Microsoft Teams or Slack or as a link. Employees do not need to download an app or sign in.
Each lesson, called a Bite, runs up to 90 seconds. It pairs a short video with a question, a summary and a discussion. Bites says the format fits inside a shift and shows whether the material landed.
Teams build the videos with AI Studio, which turns a PDF, a standard operating procedure (SOP) or an idea into a branded training video in minutes. The video can show a company’s own kitchens and uniforms. The video can show a company’s own uniforms, locations and equipment.
One video supports more than 150 languages, and employees can switch between them with one tap. When a procedure changes, an AI editing agent revises the video from a description of the change. Users need no editing skills.
Employees who have a question can ask Ask-AI, which answers in natural language and uses approved company content as its only source.
Customers Report 90% Engagement Within Three Weeks
Bites says a typical customer reaches more than 90% engagement within three weeks. Its customers span hospitality, quick-service restaurants, retail, consumer goods and manufacturing.
Unilever, Coca-Cola, Shake Shack, Wynn Resorts, The Venetian and Compass Group are among them. Sales, commercial and operations leaders at those companies roll out product launches, service standards and other changes through the platform.
Customers expand their use over time, the company says. It reports 161% net revenue retention, which measures how much revenue a company keeps and grows from its existing customers.
Bites Is Linking Training Data to Sales and HR Systems
Companies tend to judge frontline training by completion. The numbers that show business results live in point-of-sale (POS) systems, guest scores in customer relationship management (CRM) software and turnover in HR systems. Without a link between them, companies struggle to see where training is needed and whether it helps.
Bites connects data from POS, CRM, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and human capital management (HCM) systems with the learning and engagement data it captures from millions of frontline interactions. Parts of this capability are live. The funding will support its next stage, a four-step loop:
- Detect: Spot where performance is slipping, by site, shift, role or individual.
- Create: Automatically generate a targeted, branded training video that addresses that specific gap.
- Deliver: Push it straight to the employees who need it, in their language, on the channel they already use.
- Prove: Measure whether the business metric moved.
For example, if stores fall behind on upselling a new promotion, Bites plans to flag the dip in sales data, generate a 60-second coaching video and deliver it to those teams. Managers would track whether upsell rates improved after the training.
“We have shown that frontline employees complete training built for how they work. Bites’ next generation is about what happens next: finding the gap, closing it automatically and showing the business what it was worth,” said Heffetz.
How Bites Plans to Spend the $40 Million
The funding supports three commercial priorities:
- U.S. expansion: Bites plans to scale enterprise sales and customer success from New York, where Heffetz is relocating to build the commercial organization.
- Partner channels: The company is building partner and reseller channels to bring the platform to more enterprises.
- New markets: Bites plans to expand into banking, insurance and the extended workforce while it continues to serve its current industries.
“Few companies get customers to come back and ask for more. Bites does. As Bites’ first lead investor, we’ve believed in the team’s vision from the beginning, and we’re excited to support this next chapter as the company expands in the U.S.,” said Aviad Ariel, General Partner, Vertex Ventures.
As it adds markets and data connections, Bites says its goal stays the same: give frontline employees the knowledge they need when they need it, and show companies what changed.
To learn more about Bites or request a demo, visit mybites.io.
