Boston-based HelloTeam announced Tuesday it closed on a $3.5 million seed round led by Underscore VC. The fresh funding will be used to further improve on its performance management and employee engagement platform.
HelloTeam was created to support managers and keep employees engaged. Its platform provides everything from analytics on matters like hiring, headcount, turnover and retention, to a dashboard that tracks employee milestones like birthdays and anniversaries. It also offers tools that allow companies to survey employees and celebrate professional wins.
In a nutshell, it brings all the things that make a good human resources department to one site that can be accessed by everyone, even if they’re not in the office.
This kind of technology has been in especially high demand right now. The COVID-19 pandemic has left companies scrambling to figure out how to run with an entirely remote workforce. Plus, the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement over the summer has led companies to re-prioritize growth and inclusion efforts.
“We’re in a disruptive shift from the traditional in-office workplace to a remote and hybrid-work model,” CEO and founder Tanya Bakalov said in a statement. “Industry leaders like Facebook, Siemens and Google, as well as countless smaller companies, are moving to a continued remote-work model. Inevitably, they face a common challenge: how to build a scalable, unified culture for decentralized teams. Having the technology to engage, align, and inspire their workforce, especially in the remote setting, is now a business necessity.”
In response, HelloTeam has launched a handful of new features, including a free set of tools called #InternsMatter, which helps businesses manage their remote interns. Its Slack community, called Culture Corner, gives HR professionals a space to bounce ideas off each other for how to foster diverse and productive offices.
“There is a lot of innovation in the human capital space,” Underscore VC’s founding partner Michael Skok said in a statement. “HelloTeam stands apart in the performance and engagement technology market; it’s clearly winning its customers’ hearts and minds, giving companies the power of continuity in their people strategy, especially during these challenging times.”
To continue innovating, HelloTeam is growing, telling BostInno it hopes to double its 25-person headcount by this time next year. Currently, the company has open positions for business development managers, national accounts managers, technical sales managers and customer success managers.
