Toronto-based Tribe Technologies has announced a $7.5 million USD seed financing round, closed in November, as the startup looks to scale its online customer community platform for SaaS businesses.
“We believe any business should be able to build something similar to Facebook, LinkedIn, or Clubhouse for their brand in a few clicks.”
Bessemer Venture Partners and CRV led the round, with participation from Inovia Capital, Golden Ventures, and Path Ventures. Approximately $1.5 million USD of the seed funding has been spent so far. The startup has focused the capital on creating a new and improved version of its platform, which recently launched publicly. With $6 million USD still in the bank, Tribe Technologies is now looking to improve the extensibility, customization, and scalability of its platform.
Tribe aims to help SaaS businesses launch brand-led online communities and engage customers. The startup’s platform allows businesses to create a stand-alone community website to take the pulse of their customers, offer support, and facilitate knowledge sharing.
“We believe any business should be able to build something similar to Facebook, LinkedIn, or Clubhouse for their brand in a few clicks,” CEO of Tribe Technologies Siavash Mahmoudian said.
Tribe’s offering consists of two components. The first is a core platform that offers features such as member management, moderation, analytics, and security. The second is a set of modular apps that can be installed on top of the core platform to help businesses create and manage events, Q&As, ideation, voice chat, and messaging.
The company also offers apps that integrate with common software solutions, such as Zoom, Salesforce, and HubSpot.
Tribe was founded in 2018 by Mahmoudian, CPO Soheil Alavi, and Mohsen Malayeri, who are all immigrants to Canada from Iran. Mahmoudian previously led Breezio, which also operates in the community engagement space. He told BetaKit, after reuniting with his two co-founders, the team collectively created the software that Tribe now offers.
“Building an online community is less about technology and more about creating a network and sense of belonging,” Mahmoudian said. “Still, many companies have to spend a tremendous amount of time handling the technology because the solutions out there are not customizable and extensible enough.”
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Tribe boasts SaaS, consumer online service, and retail companies in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia among its customers. Some of these companies include Pipedrive, ConvertKit, IBM, ASUS, Tim Hortons Foundation, and Prudential Financial. Tribe claims it grew its customer base 400 percent year-over-year from 2019 and 2020, and achieved 350 percent year-over-year revenue growth.
The previous version of Tribe’s platform required developers to spend months building on top of the startup’s software in order to launch its community website. With the funding, Tribe is looking to make it easier for developers to easily set up their online community.
The company is currently building a portal that will allow third-party developers to quickly build and deploy apps on top of Tribe’s software, which will eventually be released to a “Tribe App Store.” This would operate similarly to Shopify’s developer ecosystem, but Tribe’s will exist for the community sector. Tribe is also working on a mobile version of its platform, also slated for release in 2022.
Mahmoudian said Tribe is also looking to improve the platform’s ability to integrate with other solutions, such as Salesforce, and some of the new funding will be used to increase the number of integrations Tribe has.
Although customer success will remain Tribe’s key target sector for now, Mahmoudian said he hopes to expand the software to other businesses, such as online service companies, e-commerce, and the education sector in the future.
Image courtesy of Tribe Technologies.