Agora Town Hall started out as a company with a mission to change what happens on election day--and the day after. The startup runs online town halls designed to facilitate civic engagement. But they've also been running these "town halls" inside companies, where employee engagement is kind of a big deal.
"I tell people about our mission and they say, 'Oh, you're a nonprofit,'" founder Elsa Sze said. "I tell them, 'No, we're a venture-backed company, having a social mission.'"
The "venture-backed" part came recently, with an introduction to the CRV partnership from newly minted investor Danny Crichton. CRV led a $520,000 pre-seed round in Agora.
"For me, it is clear that companies are struggling to create the kinds of cultures appropriate for millennials, who are approaching a majority of the active labor force," said Crichton, who is 27. "We want flatter organizations with greater access to our leaders, yet traditional companies are still organized as hierarchies. Agora has an opportunity to tap into that demand by democratizing access to leaders in any context."
Sze started Agora out of the Harvard University iLab in 2014, as a way to replace existing ways people engage with politics--social media, on the one hand, "a mosh pit of content and people," and "emails and top-down letters," on the other. "We're creating something in the middle," she said, "something that actually changes the way you engage."
Agora now has four full-time employees. Sze declined to publicly talk about revenue or user numbers, except to say Agora's users are growing by 8 percent a week--15 percent in weeks when there's a primary. It's free to open a public town hall to discuss any topic. To set up a private town hall, you have to pay. Companies have done so, she said, but she declined to say how many.
Crichton says he figures Chipotle could have been one of those customers--when it shut all its restaurants for a few hours, last month, to do an all-hands videoconference with the CEO on food safety.
"Agora would have been the perfect platform for them, as it would any organization that wants to make employees or constituents feel much closer to leadership," he said. "To me, that is a huge opportunity and the reason I’m so excited for Agora’s future."
