Our investment in SPOTLYFE

Acadian Ventures leads $1 million round in SPOTLYFE along with a number of strategic angels.

We are thrilled to announce that Acadian Ventures led a $1.0m round in SPOTLYFE. SPOTLYFE is a company 15 years in the making. Sometimes you meet people that you want to work with but the stars just don’t align. This has been the case with SPOTLYFE co-founders Josh Schwede and Scott Fowle. I met them both over 15 years ago and, while our worlds have crossed many times in the last decade, the opportunity to build something together hasn’t been certain…until now!

Call it what you want…the Great Resignation…the Great Rebuilding…the Great Renegotiation, in the last 5 years the power struggle between employer and employee has ended. Employees have won! No longer do employees just want a job. They want a career. They want flexibility. They want to work on their own terms. And they want to live a life where personal aspirations and well-being take center stage above and beyond just work.

Enter SPOTLYFE. SPOTLYFE is building a game-changing product that integrates work, life and wellness. What does that mean, you ask? It’s about being intentional about how employees manage the daily struggles of their work priorities, their life aspirations, and their own well-being that allows them to accomplish them all.

During the hundreds of interviews with customers and users in the last 6 months, it has become apparent that existing performance and engagement solutions don’t solve the problem. In actuality they make it worse. The first generation SaaS companies (i.e. SuccessFactors) did a good job of automating a bad process (performance reviews). Then “employee engagement” solutions (i.e. Culture Amp) came along and actually allowed companies to better measure their bad processes with engagement surveys but did nothing to fix the core issues and actually resolve why most employees hate their job. SPOTLYFE solves this problem by putting the employee first, enabling them to better manage their personal and professional priorities, and allowing them to put joy back into work.

Since the company launched in August 2021, the company has gone from an idea, to many iterations of a product, to now paying customers. Josh and Scott have a strong customer-centric approach and their proven track record building and scaling companies make them the right team for the opportunity right now. They have already assembled a strong supporting team in product, engineering, and go-to-market. We’ve had the pleasure of being involved since Day 1 and excited to play an active role in creating a new category of employee-first applications.

Check out SPOTLYFE and sign up now for updates on their progress.