Bethesda employee wellness and retention startup Keep Company has tapped a well-known local entrepreneur as its first-ever chief technology officer.
Zvi Band, who founded real estate-focused customer relationship management firm Contactually in 2011 before selling it to New York-based Compass in 2019, joined Keep Company this week, after the startup raised $1.4 million in fresh funding.
The funding round — which had backing from Techstars, Idea Fund Partners, VEST Her Ventures and Maryland Technology Development Corp. (TEDCO), among others — brought the total outside investment for Keep Company to $2 million since its founding in 2022.
Keep Company, one of DC Inno's Fire Award winners in 2023, was founded to help companies fight employee burnout, and subsequent attrition, by helping employees achieve a better work-life balance. It does this through an employee-benefit offering in which it connects groups of workers with a coach who leads them through a curriculum, based on behavioral science, designed to help them deal with hardships both at home and in the office. It counts a number of law firms and professional services firms as clients.
In an email interview, Band said the key to growing a young company is "building not just an incredible product, but an incredible customer experience and not just focusing on the technology."
There are challenges to be sure, chief among them being the difficulty in keeping workers engaged, particularly as it readies to roll out a virtual-based offering to go along with its human coaching.
"Almost by definition, we are serving overworked and exhausted professionals, so every touchpoint they have with Keep Company has to deliver a high return," Band said.
Keep Company CEO Adrienne Prentice and Chief Operating Officer Claudia Naim-Burt founded the startup initially to serve those who work at law firms and its clients include the likes of Cleary Gottlieb and Morrison & Foerster LLP. It's looking to cater to those who work in the health care sector next.
The startup employs six people full-time. It declined to provide revenue figures.
