Irish startup Quorum, a mobile chat startup, today announced a €1.7 million seed round led by Adjacent and LocalGlobe, with additional backing from Amaranthine and Y Combinator. The fresh funds will be used to grow Quorum’s product team and accelerate the growth of its subscription chat platform.
Founded in 2019 by three Irish engineers, Quorum lets creators and service providers communicate directly to their clients via chat, with enhanced features to moderate, manage users and monetise the interactions. The company enables a new wave of individuals to build, grow and manage a small business – right from their mobile phone.
Quorum is serving the passion economy, giving creators more control and opportunity to directly monetise their services to a small group of loyal fans or customers, rather than advertising products to a much larger audience. Some early users include business coaches, personal stylists, and learning and development groups.
The team originally started out creating tools for community builders through their former product, Monaru. But through their experience of being selected to take part in Y Combinator’s programme in San Francisco, they realised the range of administration features missing from current chat platforms, and pivoted to chat, founding Quorum.
“Micro-businesses are under added pressure to provide services digitally as a consequence of Covid-19, and we’re incredibly excited to make it easy for them to build a paid community. We found that creators were concerned about a whole range of missing features from current chat platforms. Simple things like having no control over what kind of media was shared by participants, to bigger problems around privacy and participant data being accessible to all group members, make it a frustrating experience to try and host these conversations on other platforms,” said Patrick Finlay, CEO of Quorum.
“More and more people are moving away from large-scale, impersonal platforms in search of something smaller and more authentic. The passion economy has been firmly establishing itself as a vital and viable source of income for an increasing number of people for years. Quorum is ideally placed to enable these passionate people to achieve mobile and chat-based interaction, turning fans and supporters into customers,” said George Henry, partner at LocalGlobe.
