VANCOUVER — June 17, 2025 — Acorn, the AI-powered platform that connects learning to performance, today announced its $13.1 million USD Series A funding round led by Level Equity. This investment will accelerate Acorn’s geographic expansion, enhance product development and grow strategic partnerships. The company also launched Capabilities AI, new software that automatically maps capabilities frameworks to job descriptions and creates personalized career development plans in minutes rather than months.
Disconnected Tools and Disengaged Talent
The “2025 Corporate Performance and Learning Survey: Current Practices and Employee Sentiment” reveals a workforce at odds with traditional HR systems:
- Only 29% of employees are “very satisfied” with how their company evaluates performance.
- One in four employees question their value to their organization after performance reviews.
- Nearly 80% of senior leaders admit employees must leave to advance their careers.
Further compounding these issues, 44% of respondents question the fairness of the current metrics used to measure employee competency. They also noted the lack of integration with performance management tools and lack of a centralized system to manage competencies as top barriers to the success of their program. This disconnect between learning and performance platforms contributes to low engagement and ineffective development programs.
Capabilities AI: A New Approach to Corporate Learning
Acorn Capabilities AI redefines corporate learning by identifying the core capabilities required for success in each role and automatically generating employee development plans that are aligned with business strategy. The platform provides a common language for learning, recruitment and career mobility, enabling organizations to build customized capability frameworks in just minutes.
“Corporate learning has been broken for a long time now,” said Blake Proberts, CEO and Founder of Acorn. “Most organizations still aren’t showing people what they actually need to do in their roles. By using AI to build capability frameworks and map learning content to those capabilities within Acorn, development becomes relevant, timely, and useful. It’s how we move past tickbox training with low engagement to learning that truly drives performance.”
Real-World Impact
Acorn’s approach has already demonstrated significant results. In collaboration with KPMG, Acorn assisted the National Australia Bank (NAB) in developing and mapping a capability framework for its workforce.
Pioneering the Performance Learning Management System (PLMS) Market
Seeing the need to unify performance and learning, Acorn launched the PLMS category in 2023.
This unified approach addresses the limitations of traditional Learning Management Systems (LMS) by mapping role-specific capabilities to measurable outcomes.
Additional Resources
- Explore Capabilities AI: Acorn Capabilities AI
- Sign up for a demo of Acorn’s capability-driven performance and learning management system
- Download the full “2025 Corporate Performance and Learning Survey: Current Practices and Employee Sentiment”
- Check out the research report on “The State of L&D, Organizational Effectiveness and Performance Management”
About Acorn
Acorn PLMS (Performance Learning Management System) is the AI-powered platform that connects learning to performance. With a proprietary library of over 1,600 capabilities and 4,800 proficiency levels, Acorn helps organizations define the capabilities that matter, map them to roles and learning content, and build personalized development plans. By showing learners how to succeed in their roles and enabling leaders to have meaningful performance conversations, Acorn empowers L&D, HR and people leaders to create clear career pathways and prove the business impact of learning.
