Why we invested in Centrical
Piece written by Laura Thivolet and Boris Bakech
About 2 years ago (ie. before the world changed), the team at C4 Ventures started receiving a growing wave of investment opportunities in what many today call the Future of Work. Although we were known to invest in Smart Hardware, Future of Commerce and Digital Media, we grew ever more intrigued and excited as we started connecting the dots.
Shifting the performance focus from numbers to people
We set out to meet founders in that space and came across a first trend of companies trying to address performance in customer success. A lot of these companies tap into Machine Learning to analyze huge amounts of unstructured data (based on email, phone call activity or employee time tracking) and transform them into valuable data points and insights that can lead to greater productivity and better client relationship.
High-performance organisations are not only data-driven but also people-driven and people perform best when they’re engaged.
While that approach can lead to impressive results in terms of insights, it only solves part of the problem — it ensures people follow their job description, but it doesn’t motivate them to go beyond. Worse, it can even create a Big Brother feeling or raise ethical concerns, causing fundamental trust issues in the employee-manager relationship and leading to employee disengagement or even active disengagement (ie sabotage). Essentially, it overlooks the simple fact that high-performance organisations are not only data-driven but also people-driven and that people perform best when they’re engaged. The missing piece in the puzzle would be to shift the performance focus from numbers to people.
Meet the Employee-Centric success platform
It all came together upon meeting with Centrical. Rather than simply tracking and evaluating employees, Centrical has heralded a new category: the employee-centric success platform. Designed for employees, it helps increasing their engagement through live performance management, personalized microlearning and advanced gamification. Employees can now track their own performance in real-time, strengthen their weaknesses by training daily and push their peers upward through team challenges. They are placed at the center of work processes in a fun way that motivates everyone equally and empowers them to meet, if not exceed, their targets.
Centrical’s approach is quite unique, and solves many of the common roadblocks typically encountered by other SaaS players:
1.A full suite: as companies and consumers alike adopt subscription models, one can only wonder when SaaS fatigue will finally hit us and if this crowd of new tools really is sustainable. Centrical offers a full suite after years of product research and clearly avoids the mono use-case tool syndrome. Clients like Microsoft, British Telecom or Teleperformance are adopting Centrical, sticking with it and scaling it across entire organisations.
2. Deep product market fit: Centrical is not just another corporate tool. With high UX standards, they have created a platform that employees actually use. Centrical is therefore delivering measurable and sustainable value for companies, such as shorter time to proficiency, improved employee productivity and reduced absenteeism and attrition. Microsoft actually witnessed a 10% increase in calls per agent in their call centers and a 12% drop in absenteeism soon after Centrical was implemented. Swiss Life Select, a major European-based insurance company, experienced employee engagement and enablement rates 14% higher than the industry average.
3. Versatility: Centrical is perfect for any enterprise organisation with large customer-facing workforce, making it a prime candidate to grow rapidly across a variety of industries. Its deep integration with client systems and 3rd party tools allows them to onboard hundreds of thousands of employees on the platform in record time.
Gal Rimon, Founder & CEO of Centrical, got the gamification idea from his past experience as CEO of a national leader in business intelligence software, leading him to spot the need to reduce the gap between manager insights and employee performance. When we first met this Israeli founder, we were mesmerized by his conviction and vision for the future of work, as he identified the move to Work-from-Home (WFH) organizations even before Covid-19 spread throughout the planet.
But vision is nothing without proper execution and we were impressed by the Centrical team’s ability to execute in record time, both on product and go-to-market. Over a couple of weeks in February 2020, the Centrical team put together and pushed to market a solution for the WFH employee, tackling a core issue in employee disengagement that organisations of all sizes failed to anticipate and are just waking up to: how do you keep WFH employees engaged?
We chose Centrical to be our first investment in Future of Work.
We believe Centrical and its concept of Employee-Centric success set a solid foundation to re-imagine how we work in the post-Covid world. This is why, after years of exploration, we chose Centrical to be our first investment in Future of Work. We are proud to be part of a $32m round led by Intel Capital, along with Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP) and Aleph. By leveraging C4 Ventures’ strong European base, we look forward to helping them scale in Europe and become a global leader in Future of Work!
