Bethesda-based employee wellness and retention startup Keep Company will use $800,000 from a recently announced pre-seed round to further its product development and gain a foothold in new industries.
Keep Company, which helps its client companies retain parents and caregivers as employees, has raised a simple agreement for future equity, or SAFE, round of $600,000 — basically setting up those investors for shares later as the company grows — and received $200,000 from the Maryland Technology Development Corp. (TEDCO) social impact fund.
With those dollars, the company plans to create a digital version of its support groups and curricula and to tackle its biggest hurdle — making its sale cycle shorter and more predictable through marketing investments.
Keep Company was founded in April 2022 by CEO Adrienne Prentice and COO Claudia Naim-Burt. It helps prevent attrition through a platform that pairs small groups of parents and caregivers with a coach that guides them through a behavioral science-based curriculum. The goal: to foster a sense of belonging and give those employees the tools to be more strategic and less reactive.
“I was this ambitious attorney successfully climbing the corporate ladder and then had this baby and felt like a failure and didn't really know how to marry those two parts of who I was,” Prentice said. “And frankly didn't feel as if I was being perceived as capable or committed to my role now that I had a child at home.”
Keep Company's clients include law firms like Cleary Gottlieb and Morrison & Foerster LLP, according to its website. The focus on law firms isn’t just because Prentice is a “recovering attorney” who previously practiced at Cooley LLP and Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman. It costs a law firm over $650,000 when it loses an attorney to burn out, Prentice said. Reducing attrition is big for the bottom line.
The company plans to expand into health care next, providing its services to clinicians and nurses.
The co-founders declined to disclose Keep Company revenue but claimed that in the first quarter of 2023 they exceeded the previous year's total. The young startup has four employees and a network of 50 coaches trained in its curriculum. It’s currently raising a seed round for an undisclosed amount as it tries to capitalize off the connections and skills it learned during its recent stay in the Techstars Future of Longevity, a national startup accelerator program which ran over 13 weeks beginning in January.
A mentor from that program helped the duo change their perspective on fundraising.
“She said, ‘sometimes women leave the ask implicit instead of explicit,’” Naim-Burt said. “And I think we both have learned how to make the ask explicit over the last year in terms of how we make the ask of friends, advisers and potential investors.”
Prentice added that the duo, both through Techstars and their investor meetings, to speak to a broader vision for the company.
“Another investor said to us, they saw that men tend to stand in front of them and sell the dream and that when women pitch it tends to be a plan,’” Prentice said. "I think we’ve gotten better with this round of doing what feels authentic to us. Which is a plan, like we are going to get things done, but also weave in a zooming out of the vision. And I think sometimes, that is easier to do when you have the traction in the data to prove it.”
