The office may not seem an area in desperate need of disruption, but Envoy, a Silicon Valley company, used to register more than 100,000 visitors in offices around the world every day; and a neighbor of TechCrunch SF! – has raised $ 43 million to do just that.
The company started its life five years by digitizing the log-in book with a simple approach based on iPad, and has moved Deliveries to the office with an automated system that simply involves scanning a barcode. In both cases, the alerts are sent directly to the person who collects the products or to the visitor who uses an application.
The concept is simple: no more pencil and paper, no calls or warnings, everything becomes digital.
The result is an easier life for office workers and more efficiency for reception staff, who have more time for important items. A basic version of Envoy is available for free, but features-rich options include two-tier plans ($ 99 / $ 249 per month) and customized packages for more advanced integrations.
This new capital of Series B takes Envoy to $ 59.5 million raised to date. The round was led by Menlo Ventures with the participation of the existing sponsors Initialized Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. Envoy's previous round was a $ 15 million Series A in 2015, and its initial investors include Marc Benioff and his Initialized Capital partners Gary Tan and Alexis Ohanian.
Undoubtedly, Envoy has expanded since that first $ 1.5 million seed agreement. CEO and founder Larry Gadea, who spent four years on Google after joining the 19 and then worked for Twitter, told TechCrunch in an interview that his client base covers 72 countries. To date, more than 32 million visitors have registered and Gadea is particularly proud that 80 percent of its 10,000 companies a day, including names like Yelp, Mailchimp and Rakuten, are outside of Silicon Valley. That, he rightly states, is evidence that the problem is not just a Silicon Valley / First World problem, as many ideas from The Valley can be.
"The growth has been absolutely absurd, it's a very viral product … people see it, use it and then take it to their company," said Gadea, who joined Google from high school in Canada. "Most of our businesses are done through inbound."
The children's prodigy Larry Gadea was removed from high school in Canada by Google after the company discovered an add-on he had developed for his desktop search service
. Organic growth is a good start, but $ 43 million is a lot of money and will be used to further boost things and expand the Envoy team, which currently has around 100 people. You can expect more new office scans from the company, since your ultimate goal is to make the whole office more intelligent. This could include products such as the booking of meeting rooms and other small pieces that, when put together, Gadea's hopes will allow workers to concentrate on their work, not on an unnecessary administrator. Like Envoy has done with the staff at the reception.
"We are known for the reception and the login, but I think it is very interesting and our future is that the rest of the office is so broken," he explained. "There are so many fruits that we can look for."
Gadea explained a bit more in an Envoy blog post announcing the new round:
. Although we have helped to modernize more than 10,000 pressure groups with an automated signal based on iPad. -en, and began to put some order in the chaos of the mail room, the rest of the workplace remains virtually intact: people are losing their keys / badges (and are being excluded from your office!), the Meeting rooms are reserved but they are unoccupied, lights / heating are left on after hours, there are all sorts of misplaced things that no one reports, etc. Where are the products to fix all those things? And to unify them all.
The definitive vision is a type of "office operating system" platform that other companies can develop. Gadea compares the potential impact of what Nest has done at home with its smart products, which started with the thermostat.
Gadea is still working on a name for the platform, and is not saying exactly what features it might include. Certainly, now that there is an additional $ 43 million in the kitten, expectations have been raised of what could (in the first place) be a modest proposal for reception.
