Enterprise is where the money’s at. Today, Glassbreakers is shutting down its consumer-focused platform for peer-to-peer mentorship for women. This comes a few months after Glassbreakers launched its enterprise product to support diversity and inclusion initiatives at Fortune 500 companies.
“Our opportunity to accelerate inclusion in the workforce through our technology is monumental – especially for a small startup,” Glassbreakers Co-Founder and CEO Eileen Carey wrote in an email to users late last month. “The time has come to put all of our efforts into our enterprise suite of software solutions. We are thrilled to make an impact on a global scale with our incredibly innovative enterprise partners.”
Current members of the Glassbreakers community will be transitioned onto Glassbreakers Take The Lead, a platform in partnership with Take The Lead, an organization that aims to help women excel and reach gender parity by 2025. The hybrid platform will be powered by the Glassbreakers enterprise software solution and career resources from Take The Lead. This platform officially launches on July 15.
Glassbreakers has been working with Take The Lead for “quite some time,” Glassbreakers spokesperson Rose Dawydiak-Rapagnani told me. “They are paying customers and now with Glassbreakers Take The Lead, they are our partners.”
She went on to say that the partnership will allow for Glassbreakers’ “consumer product community to continue to connect with great peer mentors alongside Take The Lead’s large community.”
It’s a smart move for Glassbreakers to solely focus on the enterprise market. In 2013, big corporations collectively spent $8 billion on diversity, according to Workforce Management, but none of that money went toward software. Glassbreakers’ enterprise software solution is geared toward companies with at least 10,000 employees and aims to offer mentorship for women inside their respective companies.
“Our enterprise software solution is really focused on employee resource group management, and we need to be hyper focused on deploying that product with our clients right now,” Dawydiak-Rapagnani said.
Back in January, Glassbreakers raised $1.98 million from Social Leverage. At the time, Social Leverage General Partner Gary Benitt said that he believed the company’s enterprise model solves a huge pain for large businesses.
“We see tremendous growth opportunities with Glassbreakers as the first to market enterprise software for diversity,” Benitt said.
Meanwhile, Glassbreakers co-founder Lauren Mosenthal and now-former CTO is no longer at the company. Mosenthal left Glassbreakers at the end of June, according to her LinkedIn account and Dawydiak-Rapagnani, who said that she left to “support other opportunities.”
I’ve reached out to Mosenthal, and will update this story if I hear back. Here’s a throwback to when Mosenthal was still at the company.
