Many organizations working in a far more distributed way than they had in the past were put in the spotlight because of the Covid-19 pandemic. A startup that saw a big boost in business as a result of that trend is announcing a large round of funding, underscoring its success in filling that need. Staffbase, which helps internal teams craft, send out and measure the impact of their communications with their organizations, has raised $115 million in funding, a Series E that catapults the company's valuation to $1.1 billion.
The funding comes on the heels of the company reaching 2,000 enterprise customers.
Insight Partners and General Atlantic were both involved in the previous round of the startup. Staffbase will be using the funding to continue building out more integrations andFunctionality across its product, with a specific focus on integrating Microsoft's full365 suite, as well as continue expanding its business overall from its base in Chemnitz, Germany
There are dozens of tools in the market today built in the name of workplace communication and collaboration, which has quickly become a huge and somewhat vague category in the area of enterprise IT. They include the likes of Teams for chatting or sharing files, Asana for project management, Airtable for sharing and collaborating around spreadsheet style templates, and dozens of apps aimed at frontline workers.
Staffbase is separate from the various tools. The co-founder and CEO tells me that part of its unique point is that it sells to the internal communications team, which is not typically the primary focus for any of the other tools.
Staffbase has built a platform for constructing and sending out communications, and measuring their impact, and in itself it offers a full suite of communications products, including an email app, tools to build and manage an intranet, and an employee app that workers can use to communicate with.
He said that they can either integrate existing apps or provide a replacement.
In the workplace, internal comms gets the thin end of the attention wedge: you may be busy with your job, or you may be working on a project that you need to finish by a certain deadline. All of them will come with a lot of noise and distraction. In that situation, internal comms might feel less urgent than they need to be.
That issue has become more acute in recent years as companies have undergone huge transformation projects and need to move into different modes of working. Keeping in touch with staff becomes more important, but the messages you are sending out might carry more information and weight than before. All this has made it imperative for internal comms teams to use better tools to reach people and approach their jobs with more focus, using technology that other departments have used to measure impact and reach for example.
Internal comms has become a business-critical area. In times of change or transformation, when you have hybrid teams, newer or younger employees, or if you are working with products that have had to completely evolve, it's important that they can reach hearts and minds. Sometimes significant shifts need to be fast. Teams are looking for solutions to elevate that.
The shift also opens the door to a wider set of use cases around what internal comms team might develop, and how it might deliver that information to employees and other staff. Although it is an obvious evolution for the platform, Staffbase has yet to explore workplace training and education. The traction it has seen and the gap it has filled in the market have helped it step into the big leagues of communications tools.
The global resonance of its mission to enable deeper engagement between enterprises and their employees is demonstrated by the significant growth of Staffbase. As the world continues to adapt to new ways of working, and as enterprise workforces become increasingly international, communication will become more valuable than ever before, said Achim Berg, operating partner at General Atlantic.
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