Ben Anderson, Arlen Marmel. Source: Quinn
Announcing our investment in Quinn, an AI-powered operating system for skilled trades and field service teams.
The skilled trades power the physical economy (HVAC, pest control, healthcare, manufacturing) and they rely on a workforce that is aging out faster than it is being replaced. Today, we are excited to share that Kalos Ventures led the $4M seed round in Quinn, an AI-powered workforce operating system built specifically for the skilled trades.
Why We Invested in Quinn
Our decision came down to three things: multi-time founders with a history of successfully building together, an underserved, multi-billion dollar (and growing!) AI-resilient market, and a product built for the trades rather than retrofitted for them.
Founders who have already built this together. Ben Anderson and Arlen Marmel have been building companies side-by-side for years.
Ben, Quinn’s CEO, co-founded Amino, a community app platform that grew to 20 million monthly active users before its 2021 acquisition by MediaLab. Before Amino, he founded HypeGenius, a profitable marketing company serving small businesses and artist managers. Arlen, Quinn’s COO, spent years in marketing and growth at Hulu, where he led customer acquisition and retention as Hulu Plus scaled, and at Crunchyroll, where he led marketing and distribution and later served as general manager of its VRV streaming service. That consumer-growth experience, building products millions of people chose to use and keep using, shaped how they approach Quinn: training has to engage workers, not just inform them.
Ben and Arlen co-founded Luna Park in 2021, a platform that used social games to help distributed teams build stronger relationships. The content-generation technology they developed there informed what came next: Quinn, an operating system that helps skilled-trades employers train their workforce. Several former teammates have joined them again along the way.
The team’s shared background in game design is a deliberate edge. They know how to make training that workers actually want to complete.
A multi-billion dollar (and growing!) AI-resilient market. Workers 55 and older now make up more than a fifth of construction employment (22.3%, per NAHB analysis of Census data), and the Department of Education estimates only two workers are entering the trades for every five who leave. Replacing a single worker typically costs 16–20% of annual salary, and more for specialized roles. 2.1 million skilled trade jobs are expected to go unfilled by 2030; Goldman Sachs estimates power-related technical labor alone could add roughly 500,000 new roles over that period. Unlike desk work, we believe this work will require human labor for the foreseeable future. Technicians still have to show up and do the physical work, which makes the underlying market durable even as AI reshapes much of the economy.
A product built for the trades, not retrofitted from corporate L&D. Legacy learning platforms were designed for desk workers and assume access to video studios, instructional designers, and months of lead time, resources most trades employers do not have. Quinn starts from what they already have: it ingests an organization’s standard operating procedures, manuals, videos, and field notes and turns them into mobile-first, interactive training. Around that content, Quinn adds compliance tracking, multi-language delivery, and workforce management, making it the operating system for the skilled trades. Employers get consistent training across every site and technician, plus clear visibility into what their teams know: they can map competencies, identify skills gaps, and upskill employees to close them.
“Trades owners are not asking for another course library. They want to know their newest technician can handle the job, and until now they’ve had no way to see that. That’s the problem Quinn solves.” - Ben Anderson, CEO and co-founder, Quinn
Quinn Co-founders with clients. Source: Quinn
Quinn sits squarely in Kalos’ workforce thesis: we look for AI applied to essential, historically underserved sectors where the underlying labor itself is resilient to automation. That combination (human-essential work paired with an AI-native training layer) is exactly where we think the most durable and valuable companies will be built.
“What stood out about Ben and Arlen is how they work: they have built together for years, they listen closely to customers, and they ship quickly. Quinn takes the craft of the skilled trades seriously, and we’re proud to be part of the team helping it grow.” - Kate Ballinger, Partner at Kalos Ventures.
Welcome, Ben, Arlen, and the whole Quinn team, to the Kalos family. If you are a trades operator wrestling with training and retention, or a technologist who wants to work on a problem that matters to the physical economy, we would love to hear from you.