Seattle-based collaboration platform Spot has raised $5 million, according to a Friday filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Spot is the new project from Gordon Hempton and Wes Hather, both co-founders of Seattle-based sales software company Outreach, which reached a value of more than $4.4 billion in June 2021 after a $200 million funding round. Hempton is also Spot's CEO, while Hather is the chief product officer.
The company didn't provide more details about the round.
Spot is a collaboration tool that allows clients to host meetings, share screens and embed websites. The company was founded in 2020, the filing shows. Users can create avatars to navigate the virtual workspace. In addition to offering template virtual workplaces, Spot allows users to customize their own workplaces as well. According to the company, users have created more than 8,000 custom workplaces already.
On its website, Spot says "hundreds of organizations" use its technology. The company's clients include Google, Amazon, Meta and Apple, according to its website.
Hather and Hempton co-founded Outreach in 2014 with Andrew Kinzer and Manny Medina, now the company's CEO. Outreach had more than 1,000 employees as of October, but the company confirmed in August it had laid off a small number of employees. Hempton left Outreach in 2019, while Hather left in 2020, according to their LinkedIn pages.
Spot is raising money and building its platform as companies continue exploring best practices around remote and hybrid work. In June, Meta Chief Information Officer Atish Banerjea spoke at the MIT Technology Review's EmTech Next conference about the challenges of having a workforce where some work in the office and some work remotely.
“Because people are not currently having fully equitable experiences, you have to really make sure that you go that extra mile to make sure that the remote worker feels just as empowered, just as much connected to the company,” Banerjea said at the conference. “I would basically feel very confident the experiences that we can and are creating in the VR world are much closer to being the in-person experience than what you see on a two-dimensional screen today."
