A Baltimore startup will use $8.5 million in new capital to build on the momentum its tech platform saw in 2020, when its recurring revenue grew 300%.
Youreka Labs Inc. spun out of Annapolis cloud consulting company Synaptic Advisors this month. Concurrently, it has raised a Series A round of funding, co-led by Boulder Ventures and Grotech Ventures. Salesforce Ventures, the investment arm of California cloud-based software firm Salesforce, also participated, marking its first investment in a Maryland-based company. The money will allow Youreka to expand sales and marketing, grow its staff and deepen its partnership with Salesforce.
The startup's platform, which counts Fortune 500 companies among its customers, allows service businesses to easily build mobile apps that can assist offsite service employees and technicians. The apps built through Youreka provide analysis and feedback to workers performing a service, such as a health care worker doing an in-home patient assessment or a utility worker inspecting oil pipelines.
This investment comes after the Youreka platform tripled its revenue in 2020. Specific figures were not disclosed. CEO and Co-founder Bill Karpovich, a seasoned tech executive who has helped build several other Maryland tech companies, said achieving that growth during the pandemic was an encouraging sign to the Youreka team and investors that the platform was ready to really scale.
"We help frontline workers do their jobs better," Karpovich said, likening Youreka to a digital assistant workers can have with them at all times.
Karpovich said the goal behind Youreka is to help close workforce skills gaps by making it easy for workers to complete complex procedures with less training and experience. While new artificial intelligence and automation technologies are often viewed as putting people out of work, Youreka believes its tech can actually help companies fill millions of open positions for field service and technician jobs, he added.
He offered an example of this in Youreka's work with Procter & Gamble Co. (P&G). The consumer goods giant previously had 15 experts in its industrial soaps division that could be scheduled and dispatched to client locations across the globe for consultations. The limited size and capacity of that team put certain constraints on the business, Karpovich explained. Youreka helped P&G "pull knowledge out of the heads of those experts" and put it into a mobile app, he said. That allowed P&G to assemble a team of about 700 people who could do the same kind of consulting work, and use the new app to make up for any gaps in expertise, Karpovich said.
Youreka's target markets are health care, manufacturing, government service and energy and utilities. Other notable customers include health insurance company Humana Inc., oil and gas company Shell and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).
With the Series A funding, Youreka will invest in adding new artificial intelligence and augmented reality features to its platform, such as a voice-enabled digital assistant that could interact with a worker and help guide them through a job, even when they are not able to use their hands to navigate an app.
Youreka also plans to partner more closely with Salesforce to combine its tech with other mobile technologies the cloud firm has in its portfolio. Karen Mehal, vice president of product management for Salesforce Field Service, will be joining Youreka’s board as an observer following the funding round.
The startup also plans to rapidly scale its team and revenue. Youreka has about 40 employees now and Karpovich said it hopes to double that headcount over the next year. The company will also soon be moving into new headquarters space in the McHenry Row development in South Baltimore.
