Meeting productivity software startup Fellow.app has secured $24 million USD in Series A funding as the COVID-19 pandemic has made the need for digital productivity tools more essential than ever.
The round was led by Silicon Valley venture capital firm Craft Ventures, a new investor for Fellow.app but one that was created by VCs that boast portfolios that include Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, Twilio, Cloud9, and Hootsuite.
Formentera also joined as a new investor; the firm a creation of Dialogue and Cesium executives. Inovia Capital, a return investor for Fellow.app, and Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) also participated in the round.
Fellow.app is also backed by the likes of Felicis Ventures and Garage Capital (created by Vidyard co-founders Devon Galloway and Michael Litt). Along with Inovia, they also participated in Fellow.app’s $8.58 million CAD ($6.5 million USD) seed round in 2019. The two rounds bring Fellow.app’s total funding to date to around $30.5 million USD.
Craft Ventures coming on board also brings expertise from the likes of David Sacks, part of the “PayPal Mafia,” and creator of Yammer, which was bought by Microsoft for $1.2 billion; Jeff Fluhr, the co-founder of StubHub (acquired by eBay for $310 million); and Bill Lee of pioneering web 1.0 company Remarq.
Fellow.app is a SaaS company that has developed meeting productivity software for teams. Its products are supportive tools like templates for meetings, agendas, a feedback portal, as well as task and productivity tracking; all meant to help managers and teams work more smoothly. Fellow.app offers integrations with a number of other work tools including Google, Zoom, and Slack.
The startup was created by CEO Aydin Mirzaee, Samuel Cormier-Iijima (CTO), and Amin Mirzaee (CPO). The trio also created Fluidware, which was bootstrapped to just under 100 employees before it was acquired by SurveyMonkey in 2014. It was working at Fluidware and becoming a part of SurveyMonkey that gave the founders a view of the inner workings of a larger organization and sparked the idea for Fellow.app.
Mirzaee told Techcrunch he sees few solutions in the market currently that are purpose-built for meetings the way Fellow.app is. “Our vision is to build a meeting productivity product aimed at helping managers have productive meetings and then manage their teams,” he said.
The Ottawa-based startup was founded in 2017, and in that time has attracted a list of customers that includes Vidyard, Uber, Stanford University, and Motorola.
With a software platform boasting a set of tools made for remote work, it’s no wonder Fellow.app has more than tripled its customer count since signing Shopify as its first in 2019. Fellow.app’s began by beta testing with 200 Shopify employees, who provided feedback that helped the team build out its offering.
The need for social distancing amid COVID-19 led to a dramatic increase in remote workers that is suspected to continue even as the pandemic’s impact lessons. And with that style of work comes the need for tools like Slack, Zoom, Trello, and Google Hangouts. The number of tools can quickly add up and Fellow.app’s goal is to be a “co-pilot,” or toolkit, for managers, whether remotely or in-person.
The company now claims to have more than two million meetings, agendas, and notes hosted on its platform.