Following his second Zoom happy hour, Ed Stevens said he knew the next product his Dallas-based business would launch.
Called Preciate Social, the social business platform offers tools to recreate the in-person atmosphere and collaboration of business meetings and mixers. And the platform’s launch towards the end of last year has brought new growth, hires and fresh funding.
“If you want to build trust… that means people need to get together somehow,” Stevens, who serves as Preciate’s CEO, said. “I call it strategic socializing. It’s not meeting with a strict agenda to figure out a problem or get something done. It’s more about doing what you would do if you had them meet in person.”
A serial entrepreneur, Stevens moved to the DFW area in 2017, following the acquisition of his previous venture Shopatron by Vista Equity Partners. Shortly thereafter, he founded Preciate as a B Corporation, which he said was to highlight the company’s focus on the value of relationship building. Initially, Preciate launched as a peer-to-peer recognition platform, allowing users to award badges based on individual accomplishments to their colleagues, which can be viewed by other employers, coworkers and community members.
“I uprooted my life, and I left my friends behind, and I really started thinking about how people build relationships, grow their social capital and grow the value of all the relationships that they have,” Stevens said.
That first product came out in 2018. When 2020 came around, Stevens said after many of its clients’ businesses transitioned to remote or hybrid work models, Preciate saw its peer recognition business nearly double each quarter throughout the year.
The launch of Preciate Social in September also brought tailwinds to the company throughout the pandemic. Focusing on the “three Ms of great socializing: music, mingling and making conversation,” the platform allows up to 50 users to virtually meet up with customizable themes and music. It also has tools to allow users to move about the virtual room, with audio and video based on avatar proximity, and make toasts and presentations.
With Preciate Social, the company has brought its total number of member companies to around 3,300, including big names like Citizens Bank and California Polytechnic University. Its customer adoption of the platform grew by more than 200 percent in the fourth quarter of 2020 over the third. Overall, Stevens said Preciate’s revenue and usage are growing by about 15 percent month-over-month. Although, he declined to disclose figures.
“We decided to set a clear purpose and vision for our company, which is to help people to initiate and grow strong, authentic relationships in the workplace because it’s the value of our relationships that help us to grow our careers,” Stevens said.
The pandemic has seen the rise in adoption and name recognition of several virtual meeting platforms, including Zoom, Teams and Clubhouse. However, Stevens said he is not too concerned about the competition in the market since it’s focused on team building and the “bookends” of meetings. People can have sidebar conversations or steal a moment from the boss after a presentation. He added that the platform could help businesses cut time and costs from traveling to meetings – two things that nearly every business is looking to take advantage of. While it has smaller clients, Preciate tends to focus on larger, enterprise businesses.
“Those tools are very good for getting work done, but they’re not very good for those sidebar conversations, the water cooler conversations. So far, our experience is the most dynamic, the smoothest movement, and that’s what is driving our future now,” Stevens said. “I’m not concerned at all about the post-COVID world. I hear from customers every day, who are adjusting to these flexible schedules and know that they have to have ways for people to build trust outside of just flying them around the world all of the time.”
Others have taken notice of Preciate’s growth. At the beginning of the year, the company landed a $4.6 million seed round of funding led by Inspiration Ventures and joined by Investors Founders Capital Partners and the Santa Barbara Angel Alliance. And to accommodate that growth, Stevens said the company is looking to bring its team size to around 50 by this time next year, up from its current headcount of 15.
Stevens hinted at an upcoming product launch for Preciate in the second half of the year and “a lot of interesting product work” in the pipeline without providing detail. He added that the company is also working on supporting more devices on its platform.
“It’s a great product now, and it’s a lot more engaging than trying to do a Zoom, but there’s so much more that we already have in our vision and our roadmap,” Stevens said. “It’s really all about taking this idea that we have now and building a large business around it. We believe that our market opportunity stems from the savings that companies will want to keep, and they’ll be happy to pay a fraction of that cost… in order to keep that savings going.”
This article has been updated to show that Accenture is not a client of Preciate.
