Work Week | Informal Chat
| Remotion Informal Chat | Omnichannel: MessageBird $200M Series C | NoLo: Unqork $207M Series C | Ecommerce: Shogun $35M Series B |
Communications
Remotion raises $13M to create a workplace video platform for short, spontaneous conversations | Lucas Matney profiles Remotion, whose founders want to informalize video chat, and get away from the heavy-weight scheduling, inviting, admitting, etc.
Mouse over a team member’s profile pic bubble, click the video chat icon, send a quick chat request and get to talking over video. It’s far from a revolutionary workflow, but Remotion is aiming to build a platform that makes video calls feel like less of an event and more like a lightweight way to quickly get to the bottom of something without back-and-forth emails or Slacks .
“Right now, when we look at teams we say, okay, we have ways to schedule meetings, and it works. We have ways to message each other, and it works,” Embiricos tells TechCrunch. “There’s no problems there that we want to fix, what we fundamentally want to change is when we use video and how we use video, making it so that you can use video informally.”
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Remotion is launching their product in beta today and announcing that they’ve raised $13 million in funding, including a Series A led by Greylock and a seed round led by First Round. The startup is debuting its product on the heels of a historic pandemic that many believe could fundamentally shift companies away from strict office cultures toward embracing more hybrid and fully remote workforces.
“I think that the pandemic has permanently changed the way people work,” Greylock’s Sarah Guo, who led the Series A deal, tells TechCrunch. “I think people are disengaged in big video meetings — they just go in and multitask, and Slack is great, it’s instant and asynchronous, but… I just don’t see most companies doing distributed work in a text-first way.”
Hmmm. Guo is onto something important, I think. Slack, Teams, and a dozen other work chat offerings are based on a text chat metaphor, which has increasingly been leavened with ‘formal’ video chat. Perhaps the Remotion model is a better way for small teams to cowork?
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MessageBird, the ‘omnichannel platform-as-a-service,’ raises $200M Series C at $3B valuation | Steve O’Hear reports on a major funding milestone for MessageBird, which is destabilizing the omnichannel communications market:
Originally seen as a European or “rest of the world” competitor to U.S.-based Twilio — offering a cloud communications platform that supports voice, video and text capabilities all wrapped up in a API — MessageBird has since repositioned itself as an “Omnichannel Platform-as-a-Service” (OPaaS). The idea is to easily enable enterprises and medium and smaller-sized companies to communicate with customers on any channel of their choosing.
Out of the box, this includes support for WhatsApp, Messenger, WeChat, Twitter, Line, Telegram, SMS, email and voice. Customers can start online and then move their support request or query over to a more convenient channel, such as their favourite mobile messaging app, which, of course, can go with them. It’s all part of MessageBird founder and CEO Robert Vis’ big bet that the future of customer interactions is omni-channel.
“People think of live chat as a ‘live’ channel, but [there’s] no ability to jump to other channels,” Vis told me in June when the company launched its omni-channel chat widget and Intercom competitor. “People still have to wait with a browser window open for a response during peak times. With the launch of the first-ever omni-channel widget, customers can now opt to have a business get back to them on WhatsApp, Messenger or the messaging platform of their choice. This means no more customers waiting in line, online, and agents don’t get flooded with tickets and can better manage customer relationships and response times”.
This funding is based on a $3 billion valuation and brings total funds raised to $300 million. The company says that fully a third of its 1500 customers have adopted its omnichannel communications platform.
In line with other trends, the company will be expanding on its Flow Builder automation capabilities for customer support workflows.
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LoNo
Former MetLife CIO’s ‘No-Code’ Startup Unqork Hits $2 Billion Valuation With New Fundraise | Martin Glass looks into the doings at Unqork, where the NoLo platform raised $207 in a Series C round.
Unqork announced today it has raised a $207 million C round at a valuation of $2 billion. This latest round, which was led by funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, brings the total amount the company has raised to $365 million.
For [CEO Gary] Hoberman, who ended up bootstrapping his New York-based startup’s initial development work, the fundraise is vindication of his conviction that there’s a better way to build and maintain software applications than using armies of in-house developers to churn out line after line of made-to-measure code.
Digital building blocks
Unqork’s cloud-based platform lets customers choose from a library of pre-built components rather than developing code themselves. Using a simple visual interface, users can drag-and-drop different components into a framework to create entire applications. This building block approach means there’s far less need to develop custom code. A growing number of startups are already offering so-called “no-code” platforms that let workers who aren’t technically proficient create basic applications for things such as managing employee rosters and expense claims.
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Unqork faces competition from other standalone platforms such as Quick Base as well as from big cloud companies such as Microsoft and Salesforce, who see a new growth opportunity in the emerging no-code/low code market. But its backers in the new funding round, which include new investors such as Eldridge and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, as well as existing ones such as Goldman Sachs and Alphabet’s growth fund CapitalG, are confident Unqork can scoop up more of the $500 billion a year that research firm Forrester says companies are spending on in-house development and on applications built by contractors and consultants. “I look at how much money is being spent [on application development] just in financial services alone and if Unqork just gets a small portion it will be worthwhile,” says Michele Trogni, a former CIO of Swiss investment bank UBS who is now an operating partner at Eldridge.
Another example of the transition away from companies building their tech stacks from scratch. But this is no tiny startup, and look at the investors. Also note Haberman was CIO of MetLife, so he has deep expertise in the financial sector.
A company to watch.
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Shogun raises $35M to help brands take on Amazon with faster and better sites of their own | Ingrid Lundgren talked with the CEO of Shogun, Finnbar Taylor, about the company’s trajectory and the Series B funding:
Shogun, which lets companies build sites that sit on top of e-commerce back-ends like Shopify, Big Commerce or Magento to let them sell goods and services, is today announcing that it has raised $35 million in funding after seeing its business growth 182% over the last year, with 15,000 companies — including Leesa, MVMT, Timbuk2, Chubbies and K Swiss, as well as household Fortune 500 brands that it declines to name — now using Shogun’s tools, up 5,000 in the last eight months.
Finbarr Taylor, the CEO who co-founded the company with Nick Raushenbush, said that the startup plans to use the company to continue enhancing its two main products — Page Builder for bigger companies and agencies; and frontend, a headless commerce solution for smaller businesses that offers faster page-load times — and to help improve its market strategy.
To date, much of the company’s growth has been organic, with a marketing team of two, and also only two sales people. “So it will be about scaling up those teams as well as our engineer and design and product teams, to deliver on the promises we made to our customers,” Taylor said.
The Series B is being led by Accel with participation from Initialized Capital, VMG Partners, and Y Combinator. The round also has a number of high-profile individuals in it, which speak to Shogun’s credibility in the worlds of e-commerce and web design. The list includes Bryant Chou (CTO at Webflow), Mark Lavelle and Mark Lenhard (former CEO and SVP of Strategy at Magento, respectively), Alex O’Byrne (CEO of We Make Websites, a leading Shopify agency), Brian Grady (CEO of Gorilla Group, a leading Magento agency), and Romain Lapeyre (CEO of Gorgias).
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“Merchants large and small are getting sick of maintaining their own tech stacks,” said Ethan Choi, a partner at Accel. While the platforms are getting ever more sophisticated by moving into areas like shipping and logistics alongside payments and inventory ordering and so on, they have yet to extend into web design.
“Shopify only has like 15 templates,” he said. “There is no design control and you look like 1 of one million other sites.” At the same time, if you have the funds and energy to build a custom site, he added, “that is expensive and it can take a whole day to change just a piece of text.”
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Looking ahead, one particular focus for Shogun, Taylor said, will be to build more tools to improve mobile commerce. Typically, mobile accounts for 80% of all e-commerce browsing but only some 20% of sales, he noted.
Shogun raised $10M series A in February at a $50M valuation. Note the former CEO and CTO of Magento, sold to Adobe and a direct competitor to Shogun, are investors.
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Elsewhere
G Suite Becomes Google Workspace | Much more than a rebranding: a reconsideration of collaboration
Today, Google announced that it is rebranding G Suite, the set of work technologies that includes Gmail, Drive, Docs, and Meet. G Suite is now Google Workspace. The tools in Workspace will retain their existing names, but I may continue for some time to refer to the new Gmail as Workspace Gmail to contrast it with the Gmail that most people still see, including those using the free version.
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Work Futures Update | Fulfill Your Drives | Anne Helen Petersen’s Can’t Even | Pods To The Rescue | Workism, Overwork, and Total Work |
Every business needs to take on, first — as elements of the company’s operating credo — the goal of working to help its people fulfill their drives for mastery, autonomy, and the respect and connection with those with whom they work.
| Stowe Boyd, What Drives Us?
