Why we invested in Happeo

We are thrilled to lead the €12m Series A financing round in Happeo alongside our friends at Vendep Capital, Maki.VC and DN Capital. Founded in Helsinki in 2017, the stellar team of Happeo and its founders Perttu Ojansuu and Antero Hanhirova have built a ‘Social Intranet’ that aims to revolutionize internal communications and make it an integral part of organizations’ business strategy.

What is Happeo?

A disruptor of the intranet industry

Happeo is an all in one social intranet for enterprises, combining intranet, enterprise social networking and collaboration capabilities into a community-powered employee communications platform. Its platform empowers employees to co-create the digital workplace, both by creating pages for knowledge sharing and by setting up channels or groups, thereby fostering top-down, lateral as well as bottom-up communication.

However, it does not stop there. Happeo, furthermore, provides for collaboration across application silos. In doing so, it deeply integrates into G Suite, enabling users to collaborate on documents on the fly without leaving the Happeo platform. Happeo also boasts API integrations with several third party applications, including, for example, Slack. Last, it provides unrivalled analytics capabilities to track employee engagement within the platform so as to better guide adoption efforts. In a nutshell: the Happeo platform adds value to customers not just by driving engagement but critically also by increasing productivity while empowering the Internal Comms function with valuable data.

How is it different from other intranet solutions?

The perfect balance of static and dynamic communication, powering real-time collaboration

When the term “intranet” is used, many think about traditional models. These are limited to basic content management, serve the role of a simple employee portal, and are treated like an enhanced “file share,” a simple informational website, or an even-more-simple page of links. Many of those traditional intranets were based on on-premise content management technologies, which have dominated the market for traditional intranet technologies for almost two decades. These traditional intranets served a role, but oftentimes did not provide sufficient capabilities to the employees of the enterprise. Many of them fell into disuse as they stagnated, full of outdated, inaccurate content. They were static websites in a dynamic world.

Modern intranets, however, go beyond destination sites into a collection of services that can be purposed out to many places, including business applications, mobile apps, collaboration apps, and other destination sites. A modern intranet also serves as a key tool for driving corporate culture.

We believe Happeo distinguishes itself from competing social intranet solutions by going beyond the traditional intranet concept to create a more engaging and collaborative workspace through deep integration and intuitive user experience, resulting in high user adoption and an impressive frequency of engagement. A way of comparing communication tools is to categories the type of communication on a scale between “static”, i.e. limited engagement and long message lifetime (e.g. traditional intranet pages), and “dynamic”, i.e. with high engagement and short message lifetime (e.g. chat tools). While social intranet solutions tend to be more suitable for either static or dynamic communication, we believe Happeo has achieved the perfect balance of the two.

Market potential — how big can Happeo become?

Enabling internal comms to improve the bottom line and fuel business growth

Happeo operates at the confluence of enterprise social networks, collaboration software and the intranet market, which are all multi-billion dollar markets.

However, Happeo is certainly not just about tapping into the market potential of these existing markets. After several interactions with the Happeo team, learning about their grand vision and all exciting elements on their roadmap, it has become apparent to us that Happeo is very well positioned to revolutionize Internal Communications. Hence, what really excites us about this investment is that Happeo stands for creating a completely new category and thus goes after a market opportunity that arguably is larger than all of the above.

Key reasons to invest

Besides the vast market opportunity, we saw the following key reasons to invest:

Stellar team with high ambitions and execution power. From the first moment that we met the Happeo team, we have been blown away by their drive to disrupt the intranet industry. In particular, we were triggered by how the entire leadership team is both data and commercially driven, each one with a strong track record and domain expertise in their respective fields. However, the high quality and execution power is not only found in the leadership but permeate all levels within the organisation.

Perfect timing to claim leadership of the social intranet market. Each of the markets for intranets, collaboration software and enterprise social networks represents a multi-billion dollar opportunity. Market growth is furthermore underpinned by strong drivers as it relates to remote and agile working, open APIs and cloud adoption. Therefore, the timing seems perfect to build a new category-defining player in the space of social intranets.

Impressive growth and traction at a global scale. Two things we rank high on our investment criteria are stellar growth and international scalability. Having realized a remarkable growth last year and established a global footprint with blue-chip customers across Europe, US and Asia, Happeo ticked both boxes quickly.

Strong and competitive product with impressive engagement metrics, based on superior UX (built on the back of a customer-centric design approach), enterprise security and rich integrations. On the philosophy of building an employee-driven intranet, Happeo has been able to deliver usage metrics which are truly unrivalled in the space.

Looking ahead

At INKEF, one of our core investment themes is “the Future of Work”, including, for example, tools increasing workforce productivity and enabling remote and agile working. While we had our eyes on Happeo already before the outbreak of COVID-19, the recent global lockdowns have shown the true impact that Happeo can have on remote and geographically dispersed teams. During the pandemic, Happeo has seen a platform average daily message increasing by 5x, which further underpins the promising nature of this investment. Its sales pipeline looks stronger than ever and the company has an exciting product roadmap which drives our strong belief that a lot more is still to come. This new investment will enable Happeo to accelerate its product development and grow its teams in the United States, Netherlands, Finland and Romania.

However, what makes us tick the most is the prospect of working together with Perttu, Antero, Lidia and the rest of the Happeo team. The two founders, Perttu and Antero, are both successful serial entrepreneurs, having previously founded Gapps Oy, Finland’s largest Google Cloud reseller and first Google Premier Partner. Lidia (CMO) has a strong track record from high growth scaleups, having previously served as CMO at Bynder, where she was employee #4 and instrumental at growing the company to a global leader in the digital asset management software domain. During one of our first visits at Happeo’s Amsterdam office, we had lunch with the whole team and were positively surprised by the strongly engaged and inclusive international office culture we experienced. We couldn’t be more excited about joining them on their journey!