A few years ago, companies like UiPath swooped into on the world of work to help teams automate and speed up repetitive business activities. Today, a company called TextExpander has built a way to fix a similar gap in another repetitive aspect of business life, communications, by letting users create customized shortcuts totrigger longer text-based actions such as specific wording around a topic.
Philip Goward, who co-founded the company with Greg Scown, is no longer with the company. You can read more about how they met at Macworld and how the threat of a clone led them to build foriOS after first launching on mac, here.
The first-ever funding that TextExpander has ever taken is being led by Summit Partners.
Over the last year, TextExpander has carried out over 500 million expansions using its platform, with 100,000 monthly active users.
The funding will be used to build new products around the operations. Tools will be included to suggest and build new snippets, to determine which snippets are most popular and which are leading to desired outcomes, and more ways of using these snippets in a wider set of use cases. TextExpander doesn't work beyond text, so there is an opportunity to build services for audio-based interactions, despite the fact that there is anAPI available.
TextExpander has been successful because of how it touches on a couple of key themes at a crucial time in the world of work productivity.
The first of these is automation, where we have seen a wide array of tools, some of which are based on machine learning and artificial intelligence, some of which are built around more sophisticated script andAPI usage to improve interactivity and information exchange between different databases and applications, and some of which are
The rise of low- and no-code tools helps to empower workers to build solutions to their own software challenges in certain situations rather than rely on developers or other technical people to have the resources and ability to solve those problems for them.
TextExpander was originally designed for non-technical individuals to be able to create their own hacks, and later as it expanded to build a way for teams to access shortcut repositories, it kept a lot of its original design.
Mullin said in an interview that it has a strong push towards speeding up andAutomating some tasks, but that it also has a separate aim of helping the customer and not the other way around. TextExpander doesn't work as a replacement for people but as a help to them.
He said that they see themselves as a super power for their users.
You could imagine a number of larger tech companies that might want to incorporate tools like these into their own platforms to expand their touchpoints with their customers, if TextExpander had considered acquisitions instead of taking investment.
Some of the investment will be used to help TextExpander work with those giant companies. Efforts will be made to build more use cases for where TextExpander might be applied as well as to build better repositories of "sources of truth."
Mullin was hand-picked by TextExpander's new investor for this role and to build out the business: prior to joining the startup he was an Executive-in-Residence at Summit.
For a long time, we have worked with J.D. Colin Mistele, an MD with Summit Partners, said that they were excited to bring his perspective to the TextExpander team. TextExpander stands out with a simple, yet powerful, full-featured solution designed to serve the needs of individuals, teams and enterprises at a time when organizations are seeking ways to empower their employees.
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