Happeo's $8M funding - announcement letter to our clients

Dear clients,

I am bursting with excitement to announce that Happeo has raised a funding of $8 million from a group of leading investors, which will propel our global expansion. I am pleased to say that this enables us to serve you even faster, and better - empowering you to achieve great things with your digital workplace.

Before looking to the (not-so-distant) future, let's rewind a bit and look at how everything has evolved to this stage.

From the first client needs to beyond

The first version of our platform was launched in Las Vegas two years ago in 2016. We sent over 1,000 chocolate boxes around the world to invite people to our launch event which was held in Madame Tussaud's on the legendary Vegas strip. After the launch we got a lot of attention and most meaningful was the positive encouragement from the crowd that this kind of easy-to-use enterprise platform was needed, and missed within many modern workplaces.

During that year we learned a lot about the needs of large enterprises and reshaped our platform vision with your requests. This meant for example building our own fully functioning CMS and wide set of comprehensive admin features which made the platform feel more mature.

In 2017, we founded the company entity and set the vision towards being a fully functioning digital workplace platform. We started to get clients all over the world – all the way from Australia to the US, and from Hong Kong to UK. We had a great growth spurt without any external funding, a pace that we could have continued at. However we knew we could do better than that, our willingness to serve you even faster and make our vision possible sooner made it worth getting extra funding to scale things up.

Last week we announced our new brand, Happeo, which describes our ultimate vision and purpose to make work a happier place. We wanted to make the rebranding announcement at this point, because we felt that this was perfect timing while we begin to scale at speed.

Happeo team members at dinner in Helsinki, July 2018.

Where is the industry heading?

During these two years, 'digital workplace' has become a very trendy buzzword. Companies are trying to find new ways to make the workplace more engaging & more efficient. We have previously defined the different digital workplace platforms, and as you can see, we have identified a bright but multifaceted future for the industry.

There are still problems to be solved in the market though. As the SaaS adoption in enterprises is growing fast, many organizations are struggling with information being spread out within different applications. This has created an issue, especially in large multi-division organizations, where sharing information widely is so laborious, and that many people don’t know the best way to share and discover company information.

Nowadays it's typical for different organization units to use diverse applications to achieve similar tasks, because there is no single place for companies to keep everyone up-to-date - this leads to chaos. In large organizations the amount of emails and chat messages that are sent and received makes it surprising that anyone can be productive, yet despite this, many still feel like they still don’t have access to the information they need.

The current status cannot last for long, and there needs to be a change. Workers can’t continue spending hours to find the right information. The company knowledge should be in the hands of the employees in seconds. This is what we are aiming to do for you, our clients.


Team members at the office

Total integration of enterprise applications

We believe that in three to four years the digital workplace industry will be holistic; the needs of the enterprise world is to integrate as many applications into the same digital workplace, where every employee has easy access to gather & share knowledge.

Our vision is that the digital workplace will be the total integration of enterprise applications. That means that everything that can be integrated will be integrated. Every unsent email and chat message will save time from both sender and receiver. That means employees are able to finish work faster, be more informed, and the workplace becomes more efficient.

What does this investment announcement mean for you?

This is where things get interesting. I cannot describe how thrilled I am about what this funding will enable. These resources give us now the opportunity to solve these problem that enterprises are having currently, and it will mean that we are able to make your work easier & faster.

In the upcoming 24 months you will see new pace in product feature releases, even better client support to serve you and more talented people to help build the platform for you.

1. Product Development

Our product development team is super talented. We have got a lot of praise for the ease of use our platform provides. This is due to the high commitment of our product team.

With the new resources we are able to hire even more highly talented developers and speed up the product development to a new velocity. Accelerated product development means faster feature production, deeper integrations and better client experience & usability.

Already as a major step towards our total integration vision, I am happy to announce that we will be launching Google Chat, Slack and LinkedIn integrations during Q3. More about this in next few weeks in our blog.

2. Client support

Our client support is currently responding to tickets within 8 minutes, and solving them within 16 hours on average, which is amazing compared to the industry average. My personal goal is to make our support even more responsive, and valuable for you. In the upcoming months we will be creating new channels for reaching you and hopefully sometimes solving things before you even have realized there might have been place for improvement.

3. Tripling the team for the next year

I am super proud of our team and how motivated everyone is serving you in our humble way, and making the workplace culture better for everyone. As the last thing, the funding enables us also to grow our operations to a new level. We have already such a wide international family already in place – 12 different nationalities serving our clients globally. Our aim is to hire multi-talented people with a diverse background in the future, and we will triple our team size for the next year. Please, let me know if you would know someone who might want to join this kind of digital workplace journey.


Team members at the office

Big thanks to you!

Thank you to all of you that have given us important feedback throughout these years. The platform wouldn't be what it is without the open dialogue that we have had with you. Please, continue to send us feedback, even if it seems like an obvious topic, we want to hear! It has had and will continue to have a really important role as we develop our platform more.

You can also reach me directly perttu@happeo.com whether you have a topic that you would like to discuss, an idea, a question or just to say ‘hi’ – making the digital workplace a better place is my deepest passion and I am always happy to chat about this.

We remain committed to creating a seamless, intuitive and enjoyable working experience for you in the future. I am very pleased that we will be able to continue serving you and happy to turn a new page in our digital workplace journey together.

Perttu Ojansuu
CEO, Co-founder
Happeo.com