HomeFundingLed by European tech veterans Ourspace raises €2.5 million to optimize team...

Led by European tech veterans Ourspace raises €2.5 million to optimize team design

Ourspace is on a mission to tackle team design, helping leaders keep employees happy and optimize efficiency. The startup has raised €2.5 million to launch and is led by three European entrepreneurs who have been behind some of Europe’s most exciting tech companies. 

It’s been reported that tech companies experience the 2nd highest turnover rates of all industries. Finding the right talent, and keeping them there, is a challenge for any business leader, but in an increasingly competitive job market, the stakes are higher than ever before.

As employees come and go, business processes go digital and team members look for better support, leaders are left with an ever-evolving puzzle – how to build and rebuild teams without losing momentum and efficiency. Aiming to be the piece to complete the puzzle is Ourspace, a new tech company launched and led by three tech veterans in Europe’s innovation community. 

Founded by Megan Murphy (former VP Product at Hotjar), Stephanie Bowker (former VP Marketing at Spendesk) and Mark Allen (former Sr Engineering Manager at Glovo), the vision is to empower leaders with a way to proactively restructure and align their teams at scale and to design these teams with a people-centric and business outcome lens. 

Cofounder and CEO Megan Murphy: “Tech leaders today face a big problem: they have talented people on their teams, but how they should be distributed and how to keep them engaged and aligned is currently a manual, biased and costly decision process. With the stakes so high, we ask ourselves, why are there 20+ products to design fantasy sports teams in a matter of minutes, yet most companies – whose businesses are built by teams – have nothing even remotely that effective to offer their leaders and teams?”

Funding to launch

Announcing today a €2.5 million pre-seed funding round, Ourspace has also shared their plans to launch and disrupt team design for the better. 

The funding was led by Connect Ventures and Seedcamp along with prominent angel investors including the founders of Maze, Grabyo and Skew by Coinbase.  

Felix Martinez, Investor at Seedcamp: “Product-market fit is important, but equally important is people-problem fit. We know how important teams are to the success of a company, and we’ve seen examples where companies have failed because they didn’t manage to find the right people-problem fit. Ourspace is not only tackling the problem with the right product, but they have the right people tackling the solution. We’re thrilled to be backing Megan, Steph and Mark.”

Ourspace employs a pan-European remote team spread across Paris, London, Munich and Barcelona for the time being. Barcelona is the team’s main hub, with two of the three founders based in this thriving startup city. 

Cross-functional team design

Ourspace is taking a 360 holistic approach to team design. Its SaaS solution facilitates cross-functional team design by bringing together people, projects and priorities into one contextual place. Whether a company is scaling up or down, making a strategic pivot or just getting their organization in order, Ourspace equips tech leaders to make smarter decisions on how they organize the people they have and the ones they need. 

The founders developed the concept after finding that they lacked the same tool – a tool that could design optimal teams that are people-centric, supportive and provide great business outcomes. 

“In my conversations with more than 60 tech leaders, the ‘OMG managing my people/product/tech stack puzzle’ is a nightmare prevailed.  CPOs, Heads of Engineering and Growth leaders from startups to scaleups currently tape together at least 3 different sources of documentation which are usually out-of-date and out-of-sync with the HR team. This gives leaders the option of either foregoing data-backed team decisions or spending hours every week to maintain this essential data.”

The Ourspace platform aims to give tech leaders a  data-rich canvas to visually brainstorm and weigh tradeoffs of re-arranging people, teams and ownership areas with smart permissions and views. The idea is that by doing so, teams work more efficiently and happier. 

Through the software, leaders can design teams based on individual employee attributes and skills, can restructure teams when products or strategy pivots, can easily cover for employees who are OOO or on leave, and better align team goals and accountability. 

Stephanie Bowker, Cofounder and CMO, says “Ultimately, we’re not just looking to help leaders fill seats but to empower them to strategically, intentionally and inclusively build teams that reflect the diverse people they serve.”

The platform additionally provides the entire company with an easy-to-navigate source of truth with visibility into what each team is working on, their goals, reporting structure and how to work with them.

Dave Thomson, VP of Product at Stuart: “At Stuart, we face the problem of working in silos when mapping squads to projects and across team ownership. Ourspace gives managers a safe space to collaborate with their peers to co-build staffing scenarios with contextual skills, interests and company goals in one centralized place.”

As of now, Ourspace’s platform is available by waitlist with the product, engineering and growth leaders at Spendesk and Stuart among the early adopters. 

Mark Allen, Cofounder and CTO: “We’re building our product to reflect our values and the values of our customers with transparency and collaboration built in as defaults.”

Pietro Bezza, Cofounder and Managing Partner at Connect Ventures: “Ourspace’s timing couldn’t be better. This problem space will continue to grow exponentially over the coming years as more companies go through digital transformations and remote teams become the status quo. Ourspace represents a rare new opportunity in people-tech: to help leaders navigate both people and economic challenges with more context, data and transparency in the org design process. We’re overly excited to partner with Megan, Stephanie and Mark to reshape the future of teams.”

- Advertisement -
Patricia Allen
Patricia Allen
is the Head of Content at EU-Startups. With a background in politics, Patricia has a real passion for how shared ideas across communities and cultures can bring new initiatives and innovations for the future. She spends her time bringing you the latest news and updates of startups across Europe, and curating our social media.
RELATED ARTICLES

Most Popular