Today startup Teamly, a SaaS workplace performance management tool, announced it has raised funding from angel investors including Elliot Loh, one of the founding team members at Yammer, the amount of which is not disclosed. The company, which started in London but is now based in Mountain View and is part of 500 Startups‘ startup accelerator program this summer, is also debuting several updates to its platform, including Yammer integration.
Teamly’s tool allows employees to enter their top tasks for the next day, week and month, and lets employers track their progress and reward achievements. Today it’s unveiling a new UI, a news stream so team members can see updates and achievements, integration with email so users can email tasks to have them automatically added to their to-do list, an updated mobile site, and the ability to push accomplishments to colleagues on Yammer, regardless of whether they’re a Teamly user or not. “Teamly helps people plan their day, their week, their month, their quarter, and we do that so employees can stay focused on the short-term, but also focusing on long-term objectives,” founder Scott Allison said in an interview.
Allison said this funding will be used to develop native mobile apps, and to add more third-party integrations, including a deeper integration with Yammer. “We’re going to see what response we get from Yammer customers, and we probably will build a deeper integration there,” he said. “Our goal at Teamly, we want to integrate with the tools people are using on a daily basis.” In terms of more third-party integrations, Allison said next they’ll look to integrate with Google apps, and said they could potentially integrate with apps like Evernote for note-taking, and Box for file management.
Several companies already target employee productivity and recognition, including Thinkfuse and Rypple, both of which were acquired by Salesforce. While Allison said Teamly shares a similar vision with Rypple, they’re going about it in a different way, since their focus is more about being a practical tool to manage their workflow. Allison said another competitor is iDoneThis, which asks people to record what they’ve done after they’ve done it, but Allison said they have a more comprehensive solution since they’re not just focused on recording things after the fact, but on setting goals and tracking progress.
The company offers a free basic plan, and an ad-free account for $8 per user per month, which also includes more security features and the ability to export data. Right now Teamly’s “sweet spot” of users is the SMB market, though Allison said they will be looking to build up their enterprise offerings as they add to the product and their third-party integrations. The company has tripled its active users while in the 500 Startups program, though Allison declined to share how many users are now signed up on the platform, and what percentage of those users have paid plans. In May the company announced on its blog that it had over 10,000 registered users who had created over 250,000 priorities, 60 percent of which had been completed. He said the company’s customers are mainly from English-speaking markets like the U.S., UK, Canada and Australia, but they have users all over the world.
The company will be demoing to investors at tomorrow’s 500 Startups demo day, and they plan to add additional investors to this round of angel financing. “We’ve proved that there’s demand for the product, we just need to scale up, build our team, and get distribution,” he said. With no shortage of competitors in the workplace management space, Allison has several solutions to contend with; but he has also seen key competitors get snapped up by larger enterprise social companies. If Teamly can continue to add SMB users while also winning enterprise clients, they could be the next M&A target in the space.