GrepBeat last wrote about QuantumBloom in May of 2024, when it was still known as Launched2Lead. QuantumBloom is an Apex-based startup providing evidence-driven, employer-supported STEM talent retention and readiness infrastructure.
For this piece, we caught up with co-founders Anne Hungate (CEO) and Andrea Mohamd (COO) to learn more about them, how they’ve gone about proving QuantumBloom’s effectiveness, and what’s next as the influence of AI highlights the need for human skill development.
GrepBeat: Before we get started, for readers who may not be familiar, what’s the elevator pitch for QuantumBloom?
Andrea Mohamed: QuantumBloom is retention and AI readiness infrastructure for STEM employers.
Only 28% of STEM-educated workers end up in STEM jobs, and half the pipeline is lost right at the college-to-career transition. Companies that rely on a robust STEM talent pipeline can’t control the supply of graduates or visa policy, but they can control whether the person they hire at 22 is still with them at 32.
QuantumBloom enables STEM retention and AI readiness through evidence-based, coach-led solutions that build durable human skills like communication, judgment, and influence that matter even more as AI takes over routine technical tasks. It’s the only model that develops employees and their managers together, is measured rigorously, and gives employers an ROI case their CFO can act on.
GB: When we got in touch, we asked you to look back on your last feature in GrepBeat—back when you were called Launched2Lead! Reading about where you were then, what stands out as the biggest change?
Mohamed: The biggest change is that when GrepBeat first wrote about us, we were still enrolling our first cohort. Today, we have evidence.
Our mission and model were built on the principle that developing early-career technical talent alongside their managers would improve retention because while people join companies, they tend to quit bosses. We’ve now put that model into the market, measured the results, and seen that it works.
What we didn’t anticipate was how quickly AI would change the conversation. The human skills we were building to help people stay, grow, and lead—things like communication, judgment, adaptability, and influence—are now the same skills companies need as AI transforms technical work.
So the mission hasn’t changed. The urgency and the size of the opportunity have.
GB: You recently underwent something of a pivot, opening QuantumBloom’s platform up to all early-career tech professionals. How would you characterize this evolution and what brought it about?
Mohamed: We actually think of it less as a pivot and more as an expansion.
We started with women in STEM very intentionally because that’s where some of the toughest retention challenges were. We wanted to prove our model where the problem was especially acute, and we did. That work and the data behind it remain foundational to QuantumBloom.
But we also learned that the skills driving those results aren’t women’s skills. They’re human skills. Communication, judgment, adaptability, influence, self-awareness, relationship management…. Every early-career technical professional needs them to stay, grow, and lead. Then AI accelerated the need. When we compared the skills employers and organizations like the World Economic Forum say people will need in an AI-enabled workplace with what we were already teaching, the overlap was remarkable.
At the same time, our clients were asking for solutions they could offer more broadly across their technical workforce. So expanding QuantumBloom became the obvious next step. We proved the model with women in STEM. Now we’re bringing what we learned to the entire early-career technical workforce.
GB: How has your team grown or evolved since we last spoke?
Mohamed: We’re built as an exponential organization. Small core, big leverage.
Our founding team and sales leadership sit at the center, but our delivery capacity scales through a network of certified coaches, instructional designers, and program specialists, backed by a learning platform that runs measurement, progress tracking, and community infrastructure behind the scenes. That architecture is what lets us deliver the same caliber of experience to a Fortune 500 company and a growth-stage firm, funded by revenue, not equity.
Our newest addition is Cheryl Stokes, our first Advisory Board member. Her relationships and experience in enterprise talent and leadership development are already opening doors. We’ve been intentional about adding depth in the places our buyers live by bringing in people who know what does and doesn’t work inside enterprise environments, so our solutions integrate smoothly from day one.
GB: What milestones or accomplishments are you most proud of?
Mohamed: We are proudest that we have evidence that what we built works.
Our first cohort had 100% STEM retention and a 50% promotion rate. Today, we measure participants across nine dimensions that are leading indicators of retention, AI readiness, and promotion readiness, and we’re seeing measurable improvement across every one of them.
But sometimes one person tells the story better than the aggregate data. One of our participants is a PhD semiconductor engineer whose baseline data showed she was at risk of leaving not just her employer, but the industry altogether. Six months into QuantumBloom, those risk signals had reversed. She’s thriving. That’s why we do this.
We’re also incredibly proud of the credibility we’ve earned. Organizational behavior researchers at Dartmouth and Cornell are advising us and pursuing funding to study our model. We’ve earned the business of Fortune 500 companies, which is meaningful validation for a young company. And we continue to be invited speakers at industry events and on podcasts and have been featured in national and trade outlets such as the National Academies, Newsweek, IEEE Spectrum, and The Hill.
And finally, we’re proud that we’ve built QuantumBloom largely on our own terms. We’ve stayed lean, let customer revenue fuel our growth, and resisted the temptation to chase what is easiest to sell instead of what we believe creates the greatest long-term impact. That has given us the freedom to follow the evidence and keep building around what actually works.
GB: You’ve been on the scene for a little while now. People may know you as a founder, but perhaps less so as a human being. Tell us something we don’t know about you that has nothing to do with your life as a founder.
Anne Hungate: I’m a 4:45 a.m. person. I’ve been getting up that early to work out for so many years that my husband of 25 years has simply accepted this is who he married. I genuinely love the gym, and apparently there is an entire community of people who think before-sunrise exercise is a perfectly reasonable way to start the day.
I’m also in the middle of launching two kids into adulthood. One just graduated from NC State and the other graduates from UNC Chapel Hill this year, so my husband and I are figuring out what being empty-nesters might look like after 25 years of parenting.
Beyond that, I love to travel, walk my dogs, play golf, and read. I’m almost always reading two books at once, one fiction and one nonfiction. I’m not particularly good at sitting still, which probably surprises no one who knows me.
Mohamed: Maybe it’s the season (back to school), but I’ve been thinking a lot about how central my kids are to my life outside of work.
My son is about to start his Junior year, and my daughter is starting in 8th grade. Startup life is hectic, and for me, a lot of non-work time revolves around them. Being the mom on the Football/Lacrosse/Volleyball sidelines yelling like a crazy person, hosting half the football team at our lake house, or five girls for a sleepover (in the same weekend), or having mom-son TopGolf dates or mom-daughter thrifting dates is everything.
As social media influencers quip, it’s the stage in life where our hobby is being a spectator of our kids’ hobbies. And honestly, I’m not mad about it. I know these times are fleeting, and I’m savoring every minute I get to be with them. I’m so incredibly proud of who they are becoming, and I’m truly grateful I’ve been able to arrange my life to be so present in seeing them grow and thrive.
GB: What partners or organizations (service providers, advisors, investors, if any) have been most helpful to you?
Mohamed: We’ve been very intentional about surrounding ourselves with people who bring expertise we don’t have.
[As mentioned,] we just brought on our first formal advisory board member, Cheryl Stokes. She’s the former CEO of CNEXT, a leadership development and executive networking company that was acquired by SHRM. Cheryl also was a Partner at Heidrick & Struggles, Managing Director for Europe at Duke Corporate Education, and Director of Organizational Capability at The Coca-Cola Company after she spent her early career in process engineering roles at Alcoa and GM. She has an unusual combination of experience (engineer to leadership executive to CEO) that is incredibly relevant to where QuantumBloom is going. She understands both our customers and end-users, plus she knows what it takes to build value in a company like ours and exit one.
We are also fortunate to have Dr. Tianna Barnes at Dartmouth and Dr. James Carter at Cornell advising us on program design and measurement.
From the beginning, we’ve wanted QuantumBloom to be more than a program people enjoy. We want to be able to demonstrate that it changes outcomes. Their expertise helps us hold ourselves to that standard.
GB: What is your next, biggest challenge?
Mohamed: Our biggest challenge now is enterprise sales. We know how to deliver the product and we have the capacity to scale it. Now we need to get better at navigating the complexity of selling into large organizations.
The people who experience the problem, the people who own the budget, and the people who ultimately approve the investment are often different people. That makes the sales cycle longer and more complex.
So that’s the muscle we’re building now: creating a repeatable enterprise sales engine and winning the next group of marquee customers. Hiring a dedicated sales leader this spring and adding Cheryl to our advisory board are important steps in getting us there.
GB: If you could go back in time to speak to yourself on the day you founded your startup, what advice would you give your younger self?
Hungate: Trust your gut, but stay lighter on your feet. I’ve always had a strong conviction about what we were building and why it mattered. What I had to learn is that you can be unwavering about the destination and still be flexible about how you get there. Sometimes the shorter-term opportunity gives you the revenue, learning, or momentum you need to build the bigger vision.
I’d also tell myself to find the right partner sooner. Building a company can be incredibly lonely, and having someone you trust who is equally invested in the wins, the setbacks, and everything in between changes the experience. Andrea and I balance each other in ways I didn’t know I needed until I had it. I wish I hadn’t waited so long.
Mohamed: I’d tell myself to be more discerning about all the startup advice out there.
The startup community is strong here and everyone—especially VCs—has an opinion. Sometimes, it’s incredibly useful. But sometimes, it’s actually pretty bad.
When you are new to being a founder, and uncertain about things, it can be tempting to do what you’re told rather than really sit with the advice and decide if it makes sense for what you are trying to accomplish. I think Anne and I have come a long way in building that discernment and critical judgment to make sure what we are doing stays aligned to our mission, values, and goals.
GB: People ask founders about their startups nonstop…. Is there anything about QuantumBloom that you don’t get asked but that you’d like to speak to?
Mohamed: We wish more people asked about the economics of retention.
Companies spend a lot of time asking what it costs to develop people, but not nearly enough time asking what it costs when those people leave. Recruiting, onboarding, lost productivity, lost institutional knowledge, and then starting all over again. That’s an expensive cycle.
We want HR and talent leaders to be able to walk into the CFO’s office and make the case for people investments in the same language they would use for any other business investment. What did we spend? What changed? What value did we create?
That’s also why we’re so serious about measurement at QuantumBloom. Retention and career trajectory take time to measure, so we track leading indicators every six months using validated measures and outside academic expertise. We want to be held accountable for outcomes.
If we can get better at connecting people investments to business results, HR stops being viewed primarily as a cost center and becomes what it should be: a driver of business performance.
GB: Finally, you finish a long, grueling day of starting up. You’re hungry and/or thirsty. Where in the Triangle are you headed?
Hungate: I lean healthier when I eat, so you’ll usually find me somewhere on Salem Street in Apex, where I live. With construction going on, I’ve been intentional about showing up for the small business owners there who need the extra traffic. Salem Street Pub, Scratch Kitchen, Serafina, Common Grounds…. I try anything that supports small businesses.
Mohamed: I love Tazza Kitchen in Cary. I enjoy so much on the menu and there are always interesting wine choices. Plus, the service is on-point and the price works for a bootstrapped founder like me!
