Dunwello, a Boston startup that recently launched a reviews site for individual professionals, has added funding from four notable angel investors and hired Tonya Mezrich, one of the Boston area’s top experts “for anything in the fashion world,” CEO and co-founder Matt Lauzon said.
Lauzon says the funding and new hire come as Dunwello has seen good early signs of interest in its offering—described as a Net Promoter-like score for individuals, or a middle ground between the approaches of Yelp and LinkedIn. The site now has thousands of users, most of them in the Boston area, even though it hasn’t spent any money spent on marketing so far, Lauzon said.
Funding
New investors in the company include Jeff Seibert and Wayne Chang, founders of Cambridge startup Crashlytics and now executives at Twitter, which acquired Crashlytics in 2013. Also joining as investors in Dunwello are HubSpot co-founder/CTO Dharmesh Shah and Dave Balter, a well-known Boston entrepreneur and angel investor who just sold his latest company, Smarterer, for $75 million.
The new investments bring Dunwello to close to $2 million in funding to date, Lauzon said. (We previously reported that the startup had raised $1.8 million as of May and that, in mid-November, it was rumored to be raising some new financing.)
The new angels join existing investors NextView Ventures, VegasTechFund, G20 Ventures and CommonAngels, as well as angels including Bridge Boys (Jordan Fliegel and Jeremy Levine), Jeremy Hitchcock, Gautam Gupta and Axel Bichara.
Newest hire
As for Mezrich, her past achievements include launching and hosting the TV show StyleBoston on NECN as well as her own weekly style segment on the station, Tagged By Tonya. Recently Mezrich took on the role of principal fashion expert and style correspondent for StyleBoston Online. (You might also be familiar with her husband, “Accidental Billionaires” author Ben Mezrich.)
At Dunwello, she will serve as a “brand ambassador,” an approximately full-time role that will give her a daily presence at the company, Lauzon said. The position will focus on ensuring that highly respected Bostonians are contributing reviews on top professionals in Boston, he said. “She will be very hands on in the trenches with us,” Lauzon said. “I think of it as an ‘advisor+’ role, where Dunwello is one of several things she is focused on, but from our perspective (and hers) she will be treated like a full time employee.”
For more on Dunwello, here’s what I wrote about the company most recently:
"After a year of testing how to most accurately reflect what a professional is like to work with we are rolling out the result," said Matt Lauzon, CEO of Dunwello and formerly the founder of Gemvara, in an email. "In short, we will be the first company to take the widely adopted 'Net Promoter Score' framework and apply it to individual people."
The score, on a scale of 1-10, will be compiled from consumers who give ratings on the site. Consumers can also leave reviews for professionals, though highly negative reviews won't be displayed, Lauzon said. ("I don’t see a lot of great outcomes from people being publicly shamed," he told me previously.)
Dunwello aims to help professionals market themselves, and also to help consumers make informed decisions about which professionals to hire, by getting a fuller picture than you’d get from LinkedIn or Yelp. The site "will allow professionals to build Dunwello profiles that feature real and relevant reviews from customers and coworkers, and it will provide consumers a place where they can view trustworthy reviews of individual professionals."
The ratings are also transferrable when a professional leaves a business. That is, when a highly rated professional leaves one employer for another, the previous employer’s score will drop and the new employer’s score will go up on Dunwello.
