The Org raises $8.5 million in Series A funding from Founders Fund, Sequoia, and Balderton to make organizations more transparent
The Org (theorg.com), the platform where you can explore any company’s organizational chart, has completed an $8.5 million Series A round of financing led by Founders Fund with participation from Sequoia Capital, Balderton Capital, and a number of high profile angels. This follows a previously unannounced seed round of $2.5 million led by Sequoia Capital with participation from Founders Fund, Kevin Hartz, Elad Gil, Ryan Petersen, and SV Angel. The Org was founded by Danish serial entrepreneurs in 2017 with offices in New York and Copenhagen, Denmark.
The Org has a growing database of over 16,000 org charts provided through a combination of research and crowdsourcing. Users can see their own company’s org chart and make edits by verifying their company email address. With businesses becoming more dynamic and complex in structure, and a workforce that is more frequently changing jobs, The Org creates a platform with real-time org charts which reflects the dynamic nature of today’s organizational structures.
As part of the financing, Keith Rabois, Partner at Founders Fund, who was previously Vice President of Business and Corporate Development at LinkedIn, will join The Org’s board of directors.
“Up-to-date org charts can be useful for everything from recruiting to sales, but they are difficult and time consuming to piece together. The Org is making this valuable information easily accessible in a way we were never able to do at LinkedIn,” said Keith Rabois, Partner at Founders Fund.
The problem today is that organizations are not transparent, which means that it’s hard to understand how a business is structured and who does what within the team. Most company structures are not publicly available and job titles are often misleading. To date, LinkedIn has been the main source of truth, however, that data is based on unverified, self-reported information which can be hard to piece together, and is subject to inaccuracy. The Org solves this problem by aggregating data from thousands of public data sources and uses crowdsourcing to verify the information.
“Today, information about teams is unstructured, scattered, and unverified, making it hard for employees and recruiters to understand organizational structures,” said Roelof Botha, Partner at Sequoia Capital. “The Org’s platform allows companies to be more transparent and attract the best talent, and we believe they can become the dominant place for people to share and consume team information.”
This funding will accelerate the company’s already fast growth, enabling the company to expand its growth and research teams, and accelerate its product development. As a complementary feature to its company team pages, The Org plans to launch a jobs platform in 2020. It is a natural extension of the product to allow companies to create open positions within their org chart and show off their team to attract new talent.
“Organizational charts were the secret weapon to forging partnerships during my 20 years as an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley and Europe. Yet, they are a carefully guarded secret, which have to be painstakingly put together by hand. The Org is surfacing this critical information, improving efficiency from the sales floor to the boardroom,” said Lars Fjeldsoe-Nielsen, General Partner at Balderton Capital.
The Org was founded in November 2017 by Christian Wylonis (CEO) and Andreas Jarbøl (CTO) who were previously co-founders of Fitbay, a social shopping community, that launched in 2013. Christian was most recently Chief Operating Officer at Vivino and has a background in Engineering Sciences from Dartmouth College and Harvard University. Andreas was most recently CTO at Rainmaking Venture Studio and has a background in Physics and Nanotechnology from the Technical University of Denmark.
“We’re very excited to partner with Founders Fund, Sequoia, and Balderton to achieve our mission to make organizations more transparent,” said Christian Wylonis, CEO & Co-Founder of The Org.
Want to join our team? Check out our open positions here!
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