Leading employee communications platform Beekeeper today announced it has secured $8 million in Series A financing. Keen Venture Partners led the round, and General Partner Robert Verwaayen has joined the Beekeeper Board of Directors. The round will be used to fund aggressive U.S. and EMEA market expansion for Beekeeper’s employee communication app that connects and empowers entire workforces, including non-desk workers, anytime and anywhere.
Beekeeper also welcomed the participation of Fyrfly Venture Partners, Polytech Ecosystem Ventures, and b-to-v Partners. Prominent angels who invested in a personal capacity include Niklas Zennström, Skype co-founder and founding partner at Atomico; Ariel Lüdi, former CEO of hybris and founder at Hammer Team; and Niklas Ostberg, co-founder and CEO Delivery Hero.
“Beekeeper closes the gap between employees working in corporate offices and 70% of the global workforce that doesn’t spend their day sitting at a desk,” said Cristian Grossmann, CEO of Beekeeper. “Beekeeper’s mobile app enables all employees to work together better, and drives the top and bottom line through higher productivity and decreased turnover. We saw significant momentum in 2016 from the investments we made in customer success and new features to support major global enterprise customers, and we will use this financing to continue our expansion into new industries and markets in the year ahead.”
Beekeeper’s new financing comes within a year of closing its seed round and marks a time of rapid corporate growth. In the past year, Fortune 500 companies across the globe have adopted Beekeeper to easily connect with and empower employees regardless of role and location. New clients include hospitality giant Mandarin Oriental, retailer Dollar General, and food manufacturer Seaboard Foods, as well as Heathrow Airport, Gate Group and Dnata in the transportation sector. Beekeeper has also increased its user base by more than 500% and currently serves hourly workers in more than 137 countries.
“We believe that Beekeeper can become the employee communication and collaboration hub for a part of the global workforce that has been largely forgotten by digital technology,” said Verwaayen. “With a great team, a robust product platform, and a focused growth plan, we are convinced that Beekeeper has the potential to become a category leading company.”
The Beekeeper communication app is designed for those employees who work shifts, don’t sit at desks, and do not have corporate email addresses. This represents more than 2 billion global workers in sectors such as hospitality, retail, manufacturing construction, transportation, food and beverage, and logistics.
With Beekeeper, companies can easily reach, connect and engage these employees to create new ways of working – without requiring a corporate email or mobile number to login. The app is built from the ground up to be easy to use and features peer -to peer messaging, communications streams, group chat, and mobile surveys.
For organizations, Beekeeper matches corporate identity and branding, with automated workflows and scheduling to fully support operational strategies and communication. The app features real-time measurement to improve communication efficiency, gain insight and calculate impact, allowing for continuous optimization. Beekeeper integrates with over 500 tools and can be extended further with shift management, payroll, intranets, or HR systems.
About Beekeeper
Beekeeper’s employee communication platform connects and empowers entire workforces, including non-desk and frontline workers. Designed for industries that rely on hourly employees, Beekeeper boosts productivity and increases retention by making it easy to inspire and inform all employees in real-time. The Beekeeper app automates corporate communications, connects peers, and integrates easily with existing systems in a secure environment.
The company is based in Zurich and San Francisco, and supports users in more than 137 countries. For more information, visit www.beekeeper.io
About Keen Venture Partners LLP
Keen Venture Partners LLP is a new venture capital firm investing in high potential technology scale-ups. The firm invests in technology domains with transformative potential. When working with entrepreneurs, Keen’s team is highly committed to help talented entrepreneurs with the best support possible by leveraging its network, expertise and capital. The firm operates from London and Amsterdam and focuses on European and select North American investment opportunities. Keen Venture Partners LLP is a Small AIFM authorised in the UK by the Financial Conduct Authority and registered as a manager of a ‘EuVECA’ (a ‘European Venture Capital Fund’). The investment in Beekeeper benefits from the support of the European Union under the Equity Facility for Growth established by the Council establishing a Programme for the Competitiveness of Enterprises and small and medium enterprises (COSME).
Q&A
What is the new capital for?
The new funding will be used to fuel rapid growth and capitalize on Beekeeper’s incredible momentum in 2016. We closed our Series A early (within 11 months of our seed funding) due to investor demand.
We’re growing extremely fast. Since we last spoke, we’ve increased our user base 500% with end users in more than 137 countries as new and existing Beekeeper clients integrate non-desk employees who previously fell outside of internal communication processes. We’ve grown to more than 50 employees, including building out our sales and marketing organizations in both San Francisco and Zurich. We will continue to grow in Europe with our offices in the UK and Germany. We have also invested in building out our global network of partners and resellers. We currently have 50 partners across the world.
What has changed since I last covered Beekeeper?
We are marching toward the vision of Beekeeper as the primary platform that non-desk workers use and need in their daily jobs. We want Beekeeper to become fully integrated into the job for hourly and frontline employees. This year we launched our employee communication hub that allows companies to integrate a full range of functions – shift management, payroll and more – into Beekeeper. Employees can now access and use everything they need within the Beekeeper app. We have put an enterprise-grade platform in non-desk hands.
Beekeeper is built to support clients with 100,000 + hourly employees (our largest client has already standardized 30,000 employees worldwide on Beekeeper). In the last year, we’ve rolled out enterprise integrations, chatbots and video to help non-desk workers excel in their jobs.
· Enterprise integration: Beekeeper integrates with over 500 tools and can be extended further with shift management, payroll, intranets, or HR systems using Beekeeper’s open API.
· Chatbots: Beekeeper’s new chatbot functionality drives valuable employee interactions in a conversational manner and environment. For example, companies can use the new chatbot to quickly survey employees on job satisfaction or job function understanding via a short series of questions in a conversational setting. All responses are captured and quickly analyzed for rapid insights.
· Video: Companies can quickly upload video into Beekeeper’s chat functions, streamlining training and new product education while providing compelling communication on company news, initiatives and more.
Our technology and Customer Success advances make it easy to successfully absorb and serve major clients. In the past 12 months, we’ve extended our lead in our core hospitality, retail and manufacturing market with wins at Mandarin Oriental (hospitality), Dollar General (retail) and Seaboard Food (manufacturing). We’ve also made a strong move into transportation with new clients including Heathrow Airport, Gate Group and Dnata. Other notable wins include Wireless Vision (the largest USA T-Mobile exclusive retailer – from their Twitter feed), food manufacturer Oberto and a few major hotel franchise groups.
On an industry level, we’re capitalizing on a huge amount of excitement around new ways of working together. On the enterprise front, you have companies like Slack, Yammer and now Microsoft Teams and Workplace @ Facebook who are focused on increasing productivity for office workers and teams. They are solving a very different challenge – we are entirely focused on empowering hourly workers that work shifts and don’t have emails or computers.
One telling example: every company listed above requires an email address to sign up. Beekeeper actually has password-less onboarding where each employee gets a QR code that they can use on a manager’s device, which a totally different approach, philosophy and point of view from the very start. I’d also add that Facebook in particular has the additional struggle to overcome skepticism about mixing work and personal lives which the others avoid.
