HomeFundingBerlin-based Remi raises €1.2 million to become the leading culture building platform...

Berlin-based Remi raises €1.2 million to become the leading culture building platform for remote teams

Remi, the culture building platform for remote teams, announces a €1.2 million pre-seed financing round.  The investment is led by European early-stage investor btov Partners, with several well-known European angel investors such as Eyeo-Founder Tim Schumacher, Honeypot Co-Founder Emma Tracey and Georgie Smallwood, as part of the Accel Starter programme. With this investment, the team is planning to expand their founding team and find product market fit.

During the pandemic, most companies were forced to adapt to working remotely, and, in many cases, their team culture suffered severely. A recent study by Dropbox shows that more than 50% of employees feel less connected when working remotely. At the same time, employee expectations post-pandemic are changing: A recent Microsoft study found that a staggering 41% of employees consider leaving their current employer in 2021 for a company that offers remote work. The conclusion? Companies need to find ways to build culture remotely to offer remote working opportunities to their employees sustainably.

To understand the challenges of remote culture building, the Remi Team conducted more than 100 interviews with managers and their teams. The results show that company culture is a topic that employees and team leads care about deeply but current solutions do not adequately address the biggest pains: curating and facilitating team activities is time intensive and often leaves team leads overwhelmed and unsure of what activities and interactions are effective for their teams. In addition, current measurements don’t take into account different realities and needs of individuals in remote organizations.

This leads to employees that feel disconnected to their colleagues, and less psychologically safe in their teams. The consequences are severe: employees get sick three times as often, become two to three times less productive and turnover risk doubles, a study by the Harvard Business Review in 2019 found.

“In contrast to in-office culture, remote culture needs to be built and managed with much more proactivity and intentionality, to ensure employees feel connected and safe.” says Co-Founder Rebecca Görres. “What is missing is a platform that does the handholding for team leads and employees. With Remi, we act as the people experience manager that proactively nudges employees to help them feel close and connected in their day to day.”

With Remi, the team is building a culture building platform that focuses on curating and facilitating social interactions through team building rituals and proactive nudges. Insights from these interactions are taken to learn from and optimize cultural interventions in teams and the wider organization to improve the overall sense of belonging, connection and psychological safety.

Remi’s approach is to combine scientifically proven models for culture building from academia and research with actionable learnings from the most successful remote companies. These insights are used as a foundation for Remi’s ritualistic experiences and nudging interactions, with the goal to help teams establish effective and sustainable habits.

Remi is integrated with Slack to ensure teams can use the platform within the reality of their existing workflows. A Microsoft Teams integration and other key collaboration tools are planned for the near future.

Valerie Krämer, Co-Founder of Remi: “We believe culture will be a company’s biggest competitive advantage, if they prioritise it. Our goal is to push the boundaries of how culture is built, lived, and practiced in the new era of remote and hybrid work. We’re taking the learnings from the most successful remote companies and making them accessible at scale for the new generation of remote and hybrid teams.”

“We see the challenges of building and maintaining a strong culture remotely every day across all our portfolio companies”, says Andreas Goeldi, partner at lead investor btov Partners. “Remi provides a unique new approach that is shaped by the founders’ deep understanding of the problem. After looking at many companies in the sector, we were particularly impressed by how holistically the Remi team explored the most effective solution approaches, building on many years of experience from leading remote companies.”

The product is currently in closed beta, with some high calibre clients such as GetyourGuide and TIER. As a next step, the team will open the beta to a bigger group of customers. The waitlist is constantly growing with currently more than 500+ interested remote and hybrid companies already signed up.

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Charlotte Tucker
Charlotte Tucker
Charlotte is the previous Editor at EU-Startups.com. She spends her time scouting the next big story, managing our contributor team, and getting excited about social impact ventures. She has previously worked as a Communications Consultant for number of European Commission funded startup projects.
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