It’s not a mystery that Matt Lauzon, Co-founder and ex-CEO of fine jewelry company Gemvara, has been working on a stealthy company culture-focused startup dubbed dunwello.
On Friday, Boston comes one step closer to figuring out what Lauzon's new project is all about.
dunwello announced that it has raised $1.4 million in seed funding from a slew of investors, including NextView Ventures, G20 Ventures, BOLDstart Ventures, Vegas Tech Fund, Bridge Boys, Axel Bachira, Gautam Gupta, Jeremy Hitchcock and Mark Guadagnoli.
“[dunwello] highlights the most important moments at work and promotes the moments that warrant positive recognition, and not so positive moments that warrant critical feedback,” Lauzon told BostInno, also noting that the platform was “mobile centric” and “easy to use.”
Lauzon claims in his blog post that the investors were specially hand-picked for the startup’s purpose. A few of them will join the company’s board or function in an advisory position. NextView Ventures’ Rob Go will join Lauzon as the second member on the team’s board of directors; Azel Bachira and Mark Guadagnoli will function as a formal advisers.
Lauzon stepped down from his role as CEO of Gemvara in October 2012 . He is still a chairman of the company. In April 2013, word got out that Lauzon was joining Matrix Partners as an entrepreneur-in-residence. In August, however, the entrepreneur departed the local VC firm to begin working on dunwello full-time, bootstrapping for the first few months alongside developer Matt Brand.
The startup really began building hype back in October 2013 with the creation of its @TeamDunwello Twitter account. The handle sent out a curiosity-peaking message inviting companies to see if they had been given exclusive access to dunwello’s platform that fulfills the startup’s “We believe every every person at every company should be both happy and productive” mission.
“Around 70 percent of employees don’t feel engaged at work … and the average success rate for a new employee is really low, and I think that’s because there’s a really rapidly changing way we all feel connected to the world,” shared Lauzon. We have Facebook for connecting with family and friends, LinkedIn for our professional life and Twitter for the daily happenings and events that interest us. Yet there’s no social medium for sharing at work.
“As dunwello gets to be something that really makes employees feel connected at work, the risk [of not having the platform] will be that you rapidly fall behind as other companies figure out how to keep people more aligned, more productive and better performing,” posited Lauzon.
Lauzon said that dunwello has since pushed the beta companies off the platform in preparation for its new upgrade, which is set to roll out in the next few weeks. According to the founder, “a few hundred companies have signed on” for the upcoming release.
Stay tuned to BostInno for updates on dunwello’s happenings.
