Fellow.app, an Ottawa-based SaaS company, has closed an $8.58 million CAD ($6.5 million USD) Seed round to build out a cloud-based smart assistant tool for managers.
After beta testing with Shopify, Fellow.app has signed on the e-commerce giant as its first official customer.
The round was backed by iNovia Capital, Felicis Ventures, and Vidyard co-founders Devon Galloway and Michael Litt’s Garage Capital, as well as several unnamed angel investors. The company’s beta software offering, used by employees at companies like Shopify, Vidyard, Tulip, North, Time Doctor, VerticalScope, and Multiview, was designed to help leaders manage their one-on-one interactions, team meetings, feedback, and priorities within a centralized cloud-based tool.
“We decided to interview industry leaders, learn from the best coaches, and read a wide variety of books to determine the traits and practices that make someone a great manager,” said Aydin Mirzaee, CEO of Fellow.app. “In the end, we built our learnings into Fellow.app, an app that aims to help managers become exceptional leaders.”
The company was founded in 2017 by Aydin, Samuel Cormier-Iijima, and Amin Mirzaee, the co-founders of Fluidware, which was bootstrapped to just under 100 in staff, before being acquired by SurveyMonkey in 2014. Working at Fluidware gave the team an intimate view of the inner-workings of a larger organization, ahead of their decision to build a tool for similar companies.
“As our last company grew, we benefited and learned from software for every aspect of our business, from sales to marketing, to customer success,” said Aydin. “However, as our number of direct reports grew, we always wondered, ‘why isn’t there a great app for managers of people?’”
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Fellow.app’s tool is aimed to be a “co-pilot” for managers, by suggesting questions that managers can ask during meetings, people they should check-in regularly with, and specific moments and ways in which they could ask for feedback. Some of its features include one-on-one agenda scheduling, a portal to send and receive feedback, an action items tool, a priority-setting goal feature, and a team shout-out tool.
Aydin told BetaKit this new funding will be used to advance the company in preparation launching the platform to the public in the fall of this year. The company also announced that Shopify has signed on as Fellow.app’s first official customer, with employees around the world will now be using Fellow.app to manage their work interactions and exchange peer-to-peer feedback. The company’s beta testing period began with 200 Shopify employees, who provided feedback that helped the team build out its offering.
Fellow.app is offering a free trial of its software, as well as a “VIP discount” for teams and organizations that sign up during the beta period.
Image courtesy Fellow.app
