Ken Babcock and Dan Giovacchini, his co-founders and Brian Shultz were in Harvard Business School, March 2020, when they felt the need to create Tango. Tango is a Chrome extension that automatically captures best practices in workflow so teams can learn from top performers.
The pandemic drove this window of opportunity, as many companies became distributed and went remote, CEO Babcock explained to TechCrunch. For the first time ever, team leaders were able to remotely onboard people and accelerate ramp times. It was impossible to tap people's shoulders in the office anymore, so most of the training was done by people themselves.
They quit their program to create Tango in Los Angeles, and today announced a $5.7million seed round for the company's workflow intelligence platform. General Catalyst and Outsiders Fund joined Wing Venture Capital as the lead investors. A number of angel investors joined the round, including Michael Stoppelman (ex-executive at Yelp), Shoaib Makani, KeepTruckin CEO, and Julia Lipton, Awesome People Ventures Julia Lipton.
Tango was created to help employees in customer success and sales enablement save up to 20% of their workweek searching for the right information or finding the right person to assist them with a task. The technology records the user's workflow, URLs, screenshots, and links and then turns it into video tutorials.
Babcock explained that the co-founders had previously bootstrapped Tango. They decided to seek seed funding to expand the product, growth teams, and invest in product design so Tango could adopt a product-led growth strategy. Now, the team has 13 employees.
Tango started last year and has now secured 10 pilots to help it understand the data and capabilities. It will launch publically in September. Babcock stated that the company will always offer a free product and will also have premium and enterprise versions which will unlock additional capabilities.
Babcock said that integrations are key and people need to meet consumers where they are. We are working to reduce the burden of creating documentation and, for those companies already using Wikis or other materials we will be learning how to insert ourselves into those systems.
Wing Venture Capital partner Zach DeWitt said that he first met the company through a mutual friend three years ago.
His company invests in startups that are early stage and business-to-business. This unlocks a new data set. Tangos was creating a data set that can be used to analyze workflows for both the business and the enterprise.
Dewitt stated that 150 SaaS apps are used by the average tech company, up from 20 in a decade. There are many options about which app to choose, how to use them and what to do if the user is stuck. Tango is the backbone of a business's success. It captures the workflow and works in the background.
He said that the whole approach was amazing to me. It is important to be able to see people at their worst and anticipate where they will get stuck, so that you can help them with the Tango tutorial. This can change the culture of the company by rewarding people who share their knowledge. This idea benefits multiple people: those who are stuck, and new hires. This is a powerful idea.
