About
Chance is a product that enables anyone, regardless of their background, to choose and access career opportunities most suited to their sense of purpose, skills and abilities. The core objective is to accelerate social mobility through enhancing engagement and performance in employment. Chance’s products and services combine advanced data science and psychological techniques, pioneering an emerging category of PsyTech, into a digitally-led personalised online coaching experience that enables self-reflection, exploration and career validation over a three month period.
The programme blends 24 hours of automated self-coaching, guiding users to reveal their aspirations and strengths, with 6 hours of video-coaching with professional career coaches, who guide users to turn discoveries into defined actions.
From the insights gained in the first phases, Chance is able to recommend 40 potential career options, and then assist in refining a selection of relevant options whilst also enabling networking opportunities with established talent in the most interesting vocations identified. At the end of the programme platform users are equipped and empowered to secure a new professional life with potential employers now able to understand how to adjust their hiring criteria to look beyond educational credentials or past career accolades. Revenues are generated from fees charged at programme sign-up, either via a free-trial and premium offering. The product is available in French-speaking markets today with c.70% of participants female from the c.10,000 users in 2020 to date. The programme is fully accredited to be financed through French Personal Training Credits (CPF) available to all French taxpayers and, as a social business leader, 25% of all users of the programme have salaries below €1400 net per month.
Founded in 2015 by Ludovic de Gromard and Clemence Coghlan, Chance is approaching a period of growth following a fundamental pivot in early 2018. The genesis of Chance can be traced to Ludovic de Gromard’s education in social entrepreneurship and applied psychology, early career experiences in hiring teams and an opportunistic presentation to Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize winner, at a conference in Bangladesh in late 2014.
The Chance concept was first launched in Brazil, given the social context, with funding secured through Google.org’s Impact Challenge. Initial products identified high potential candidates from comparative game-based recruitment test data. Whilst significant enterprise contracts were secured for recruiting this talent, the recruiting business model conflicted with the social impact goals of Chance. This led to a pivot in early 2018 to reposition the product as a candidate centric B2C offering. At the same time, Chance relocated its headquarters to Paris, assisted by further funding from Google.org and success in the Facebook France Start-Up competition. This led to the launch of their new digital B2C augmented coaching programme in 2019.
In April 2020 Chance completed Series A financing totalling €5.6m led by Zulu Group, Google.org, French Ministry of Labour and various family offices. Muhammad Yunus operates as Honorary President alongside advisors Francoise Gri, former CEO of Manpower and IBM France, Alex Asseily, founder of Jawbone, Robert Dilts, a world leader in coaching and Gilles de Robien, former French Minister for Education. Today the organisation is c.30 employees supported by a community of over 100 partner coaches.
The central goal is to build a robust and independent social company for the long term, and to achieve this Chance is now embarking on a significant expansion phase to complete its product offering and fulfil the market opportunity at scale.
