HelloTeam, a Boston-based startup offering a platform to manage and engage employees, has brought in $3.5 million in seed funding.
The round was led by Boston firm Underscore VC, with participation from Osage Venture Partners, Ventureforgood and others.
HelloTeam got its start in 2016, around the same time founder and CEO Tanya Bakalov left her previous startup, SevOne, which was ultimately sold to Turbonomic last year. Bakalov built SevOne from the ground up as co-founder and oversaw its operations as a senior vice president for more than a decade. That experience, she told BostInno, inspired her in part to found HelloTeam.
"I'm really a founder who has actually lived the problem herself," Bakalov said. "The first company I started grew from me and a couple other people to close to 600 employees worldwide. While it was growing from the couple people to 100, then 200—every milestone we hit, I encountered different problems with the way we engaged our people, connected our people, made sure everybody felt recognized and valued."
Bakalov returned to her previous investors with an idea. What if she could build a platform that provided solutions to all of those problems?
Bakalov's vision was a comprehensive piece of software that would allow managers to keep track of their employees, schedule weekly one-on-ones, set up performance reviews, give internal rewards and generally ensure an employee's work is contributing to the company's overall business. Employees would be able to engage with their managers, too, so engagement would remain a two-way street.
"It's an all-in-one employee engagement and performance tool," Bakalov said. "Whether you're the employee or the manager, you can create different ways to communicate with each other."
Today, HelloTeam's platform offers all those tools. It is used by several hundred companies, Bakalov said, ranging from large corporations to nonprofit organizations. Boston-area HelloTeam customers include Botkeeper, Zageno and NTI.
HelloTeam currently employs about 25 people. Bakalov hopes to use the seed round to hire up to six people by the end of the year and fully double the team by this time next year. Open roles include business development managers, a technical sales and customer success manager and a national accounts manager.
The startup's seed raise also comes at a time when more companies are using its platform to manage newly remote teams amid the coronavirus pandemic.
"We're seeing companies that have been doing [performance review] processes on paper or haven't been doing those processes, and now, they're asking 'what are we going to do'—not just for the next two weeks, but for the next two years and possibly the rest of our careers?" Bakalov said. "We're helping companies build a scalable, virtual culture around feedback that's more continuous, more timely and more actionable, making sure people feel recognized for the work they're achieving."
