Mindflash Zooms Ahead in Online Employee Training, Adds $3.5 Million

building an HTML5 version of the Mindflash player that could be placed inside a thin iOS wrapper to make it iPad-compatible.

Courses created by trainers inside HR departments—which typically start out life as PowerPoint or Word documents, before they’re uploaded to Mindflash—now get converted to videos that will play with equal fidelity on a Web browser or a tablet. “We’ve really beat the industry on this front,” Wells says. “Your content appears on the Web and the iPad exactly as you built it on the desktop.”

Thanks to all that work, the company is now in a much stronger position to expand to more platforms, Wells says. It’s likely that Mindflash will introduce an Android version of its player this year. Already, 25 percent of Mindflash’s business comes from overseas clients, and Wells thinks getting the app onto Android will lead to more international business, in light of the fact that Android tablets have a big lead over the iPad in most markets outside the United States.

The day isn’t far away, Wells says, when a new hire arriving at the office for the first time will be handed three things: an ID card, a uniform, and a tablet computer holding all the required training courseware. “Clearly, it’s starting to happen now, and it will be the dominant new-hire onboarding experience down the road,” she says. It’s a good bet that Mindflash will be one of the leading companies making that possible.