Trainual: How Chris and Jonathan Ronzio Built a Business Training Software Company
Chris Ronzio spent most of his life running small businesses before he ever set out to build software. He started a youth-sports video production company at fourteen and ran it for more than a decade before stepping away from it. From there he founded Organized Chaos, a consulting practice that worked with small businesses, generally somewhere between five and fifty employees, to audit their operations, clean up their technology stack, and write down the standard operating procedures that most small companies never bother to document. That consulting work turned out to be the direct precursor to Trainual: he kept building the same kind of internal documentation tool for client after client, and eventually realized the tool itself was the more scalable business.
According to the founding story Chris and his brother Jonathan Ronzio have told in interviews and company materials, Trainual began in 2018 as an internal tool inside Organized Chaos, built to help consulting clients capture their onboarding materials and standard operating procedures in one place. Jonathan, who ran his own media agency, was off the grid on a glacier expedition at the time and needed a way to delegate work to his team without being reachable. He used an early version of the tool to do it, and the experience became the moment the brothers point to as the catalyst for spinning the internal tool into a standalone piece of software. Jonathan joined as co-founder and took on the marketing side of the business, while Chris ran the company as CEO.
Trainual has raised roughly 34 million dollars across its funding history, including a Series A of about 6.75 million dollars led by 4490 Ventures and MATH Venture Partners, and a 2021 Series B of 27 million dollars with investors including Altos Ventures and Daymond John. Revenue and customer figures are harder to pin down precisely, since Trainual does not publish audited numbers publicly. Third-party trackers that estimate SaaS company revenue, such as Latka, have put the company’s annual revenue at roughly 15 million dollars in 2023 and around 32.6 million dollars in 2024, with a customer base cited at around 8,000 companies. Those numbers should be treated as outside estimates rather than confirmed figures, but they are broadly consistent with a company that has scaled meaningfully since its 2018 founding without becoming a household name outside the small-business software world.
The product itself is a cloud-based platform for documenting how a business actually runs: standard operating procedures, role-based training paths for new hires, quizzes and completion tracking to confirm employees actually absorbed the material, and more recently an AI tool that helps generate a first draft of an SOP from a rough description. It integrates with common HR systems and is priced in flat monthly tiers based on company size rather than per employee, which is a deliberate choice aimed at small and mid-sized businesses that want predictable costs as they add headcount. The pitch is straightforward: most small businesses run on tribal knowledge that lives in one or two people’s heads, and that becomes a serious liability the moment those people are unavailable, whether through vacation, turnover, or simply growth outpacing what one person can carry.
Trainual competes in a crowded but fragmented category of tools built around documenting and standardizing work. Scribe and Tango focus more narrowly on automatically capturing how-to guides from screen recordings, which makes them lighter-weight but thinner on the structured training and tracking side. Whale offers a similar SOP and knowledge-base product with a free tier aimed at smaller teams. Broader platforms like Process Street, Guru, and Confluence overlap with parts of what Trainual does without being purpose-built for onboarding and training specifically. In October 2025, Trainual made its first acquisition, picking up Uptick, a performance-management tool covering one-on-ones, goal tracking, and employee engagement, extending the company beyond pure documentation and training into the broader question of how a growing team manages people, not just processes.
On Starting Small, Chris and Jonathan Ronzio talked with host Cameron Nagle about how a consulting business turns into a software company, what it actually took to convince small-business owners to pay for something as unglamorous as SOP documentation, and how working as brothers has shaped the way they split responsibility and handle disagreement inside the company. They also spoke about the decision to expand beyond training into performance management with the Uptick acquisition, and what they see as the next stage of growth for a company built specifically for businesses that are often overlooked by larger enterprise software vendors.
Trainual’s path from a side effect of a consulting business to a venture-backed software company with tens of millions of dollars in estimated revenue is a reminder that not every successful software product starts with a founder setting out to build software. In this case, it started with two brothers trying to solve a smaller, more specific problem, documenting how a business actually works, and following the pull toward it as clients kept asking for more.
