Today Finnish startup Happeo, an employee communications platform, announces having raised approximately €10.9 million in a Series A funding round led by INKEF Capital. Happeo’s previous investors DN Capital, Maki.vc and Vendep Capital also joined the round. This new investment will enable Happeo to accelerate its product development and grow its teams in the Netherlands, Finland, Romania and the United States.
Happeo, founded in 2017, is on a mission to make work a happier place. To fulfil this uplifting goal, it offers an intranet, enterprise social network and collaboration platform, which is run by companies’ communities of employees. The team, which is spread across The Netherlands, Finland, Romania and the United States, has already got some major clients on board, like WWF and Randstad Sourceright, and was recognised as one of Europe’s most promising startups by the European Union in 2017 and one of Europe’s hottest scale ups by The Next Web and Adyen in 2019.
Happeo’s platform solves a common problem with intranets: low usage rates. As one of the only vendors in its industry, Happeo has been able to develop a platform with high usage metrics, noticeable through its high Daily Active Use/Monthly Active Use ratio (the industry-standard metric for social-enabled platforms). For the past twelve months, Happeo’s average sits at 50%, which is on par with the world’s most popular web apps. Additionally, the social intranet platform has seen an increase in average daily messages sent within the platform, going from 500,000 to over 2.5 million in the first quarter of this year, as companies increasingly rely on a remote workforce.
Happeo’s advantage, according to CEO and Founder Perttu Ojansuu, is that “beyond providing a platform that bridges remote communication and collaboration together, we are end-user obsessed. This created our user-first design philosophy, which is our main competitive advantage.”
Kyang Yung, Director at INKEF Capital says; “From the first moment that we met the Happeo team, we have been blown away by their drive to disrupt the intranet industry. Happeo has been able to deliver usage metrics which are truly unrivalled in the space. We look forward to working with this team of seasoned operators and supporting them in leading the way to a new kind of social intranet.”
The funding round will enable Happeo to further expand its unconventional approach to internal communications, which manifests itself in deep integrations with leading workplace-communication tools such as Slack and G Suite. The company will also integrate with Zoom in the coming months, creating a holistic spectrum of digital communication tools where employees discuss, meet, share files and work with business apps.
This year we included Happeo on our list of 10 most promising Finland-based startups to watch in 2020. So continue to watch this space.