Boston employee feedback company dunwello announced Wednesday that it has banked $250,000 from CommonAngels, taking its total funding to around $1.8 million.
The fresh financing comes just three months after the stealthy startup officially announced its seed round of $1.4 million from a stacked list of investors, including NextView Ventures, G20 Ventures, BOLDstart Ventures, Vegas Tech Fund, Bridge Boys and Axel Bachira.
Wednesday’s raise, which is an extension of that round, will be used to accelerate product development.
“We weren’t actually looking for funding at the time,” dunwello Co-founder and CEO Matt Lauzon admitted to BostInno. “But I really, really liked Maia [Heymann] and I felt like we were really aligned with the fund.”
It took nearly three months for her to get Lauzon and the dunwello team onboard with the investment, Heymann told BostInno, laughing.
“At the end, we both realized that this is a very good investor-company relationship,” Heymann said. “You have to feel that the person you’re backing is the best person on the planet to execute that vision. In this case, Matt is that person.”
Lauzon is a Boston tech man-about-town, former CEO of customizable fine jewelry company Gemvara, and one-fourth of the dunwello team. Fellow co-founder Matt Brand serves as the startup’s CTO. The entrepreneurial pair was also recently joined by a new director of product, Hilario Coimbra, formerly of Abine, and engineer, Tyler Cone. Dunwello is now actively looking to hire a director of content marketing and designer, too.
In terms of external growth, the company has received interest from a wide range of companies that employ anywhere from “10 to tens of thousands,” Lauzon shared. What’s been surprising since the startup rolled out its beta, however, is the amount of interest dunwello has seen from larger corporations.
“We’re the first company that's really trying to re-imagine feedback at work,” explained the CEO. While the idea might also appeal to larger firms, Lauzon said that he ideally wants the platform to be simple enough for “anyone at a company to get it up and running.”
Dunwello is currently testing a few different versions of its customer feedback and engagement platform in the market, and plans to add more companies in June and July in preparation for a bigger launch later this year.
“We all talk about continuous feedback from customers ... but no one has really figured out how to do that for employees yet, so they can do their work better,” explained Heymann.
But from what we can tell, dunwello seems to have the solution.
