Our Investment in Involvesoft

On Persistence, Resilience, and Developing The Best Company Culture

In 2017, the modern American workforce reached a very crucial inflection point. 56 million millennials (those ages 21 to 36) were working or looking for work in 2017, surpassing the 53 million Gen-Xers, accounted for a third of the labor force, and will be hiring many more millennials onto their teams for years to come.

With them, this growing millennial workforce is bringing new expectations and priorities for their careers, their colleagues, their work spaces, and perhaps most crucially, their company’s culture, core beliefs, and values. Every business wants high employee engagement, overall better retention, and an admirable company culture. They like to say they are diverse and inclusive, are aligned with their employees’ causes and charities, and present themselves as being “mission driven”. But let’s be honest.

Unless you’re at small or early-stage company where culture still emanates down from the founders (say <500 employees) OR you’re at one of the largest firms (say 5,001+ employees) who have budgets for whole teams focused on solely on engagement and retention – you and your co-workers are likely being underserved. It’s no wonder that mid-sized businesses of 500 to 5,000 employees, especially those in sectors like technology and professional services, have some of the highest turnover rates.

The latest wave of human resources/people management tools did well to focus on operational challenges like hiring, on-boarding, benefits and compensation for these mid-size businesses. They fell short, however, when it came to providing these same employers with a way to create better engagement within their work community.

This was a key insight that Involvesoft CEO Gaurav Bhattacharya and his co-founder/CTO Saumya Bhatnagar had when they launched Involvesoft just a few years back. After meeting in a programming class over a decade ago, Gaurav and Saumya launched, raised funding for, and eventually sold their first start-up, a technology that helped the Indian Government identify and prevent cases of female infanticide. After college, these mission-driven founders came back together, this time tackling company culture and helping employers engage their employees more meaningfully.

Involvesoft launched as a SaaS platform for corporate volunteering, connecting employees and their teams to local service opportunities, helping companies become more socially active in the community, and helping employees utilize paid days of Volunteer Time Off (or “VTO”) in more productive ways. This means that your monthly team happy hour can now seamlessly become your monthly day of service – creating a stronger sense of team bonding around becoming active in the community together. As they have grown in reach and utilization, Involvesoft has seen the opportunity to become a premier workplace tool not just for community involvement but employee affinity groups and leadership development too. The more time we spent with them, the more enthusiastic we became about Gaurav and Saumya’s vision, their metrics-driven mindset, and their ability to recruit a great, experienced team around them to accomplish their ambitious goals.

It was that metrics-driven mindset and Gaurav’s unique persistence that brought LaunchCapital and Involvesoft together. When VCs tell founders who are “too early” to “keep in touch” it usually ends up being the last interaction they’ll ever have. When Gaurav first caught our eye, he had only a few customers and smaller contracts, but unlike many founders, he continued to refine his product with user feedback, executed on his sales strategy, and sent us short, monthly updates on how well the business was growing. It only took a few months of updates for us to look back and realize that something was really clicking! The realization that Involvesoft had built a valuable and sought after solution for mid-size businesses was re-enforced by all of our conversations with their customers. Their growth and continued success is a testament to the founders’ resilience, their persistence, and most of all, the unshakeable belief in their ability to improve workplace culture around the world.

We’re also incredibly honored to be co-investors alongside some of the best investors in the rapidly growing LA ecosystem, including Bonfire Ventures, Greycroft, Mucker Capital, and Noname Ventures. Involvesoft is the third of our recent investments out of Santa Monica, so it’s safe to say LaunchCapital is #LongLA

Lastly, Gaurav and Saumya have, as you’d expect, built a really fun, energetic, and high-output culture at Involvesoft and they will be growing their team in the coming months. Check out LaunchCapital’s jobs board here to learn more and join the mission!