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

Happeo’s newly secured eight million dollars of investment will significantly accelerate product development by allowing the company to hire more highly talented software developers. This injection of capital will drive a faster velocity in feature production, deeper application integrations, and an improved overall user experience. The ultimate goal is to move closer to the vision of total integration, where all essential enterprise tools live under one unified digital roof to save employees time.

To kickstart this vision of total integration, Happeo has announced the upcoming launch of several major integrations. Specifically, users can expect to see Google Chat, Slack, and LinkedIn integrations rolling out during the third quarter. These additions are designed to streamline communication channels, helping to prevent the information chaos that frequently occurs in large, multi-division organisations where vital data is often spread across disconnected systems.

By bringing these widely used platforms into a single digital workplace, the company aims to make finding and sharing knowledge an instantaneous process. Instead of spending hours searching for documents or coordinating between disparate communication applications, employees will be able to access what they need in seconds. This accelerated pace of development is a direct result of the funding, ensuring clients benefit from a more cohesive and efficient working environment.

Happeo plans to use the new funding to drastically scale its operations, with a primary goal of tripling the size of its team over the next year. Currently, the company boasts a highly diverse and international family representing twelve different nationalities serving a global client base. To support its rapid expansion, Happeo is actively looking to recruit multi-talented individuals from diverse backgrounds who want to join them on this digital workplace journey.

This dramatic increase in team size will directly benefit client services, particularly when it comes to customer support. Happeo already delivers impressive support metrics, with an average ticket response time of just eight minutes and a resolution time of sixteen hours, which is far ahead of the standard industry average. The investment will allow the company to build on these strong foundations and make the support system even more responsive.

In the coming months, the company will introduce brand-new communication channels to reach clients more effectively. The ultimate ambition is to transition towards a highly proactive support model, where the team can identify and resolve potential issues before clients even realise there is room for improvement. By combining a larger, highly motivated workforce with advanced support tools, the business aims to deliver an unparalleled level of service to its global customer base.

The journey began back in 2016 when the first version of the platform was launched at an event in Madame Tussauds on the Las Vegas strip, accompanied by one thousand chocolate boxes sent worldwide. The launch received significant attention and positive encouragement from attendees, who highlighted the critical need for an easy-to-use enterprise platform in modern workplaces. This feedback shaped the development of a fully functioning CMS and comprehensive administrative features.

By 2017, the official company entity was founded, and the vision of creating a complete digital workplace platform was set in motion. The business quickly attracted clients globally, stretching from Australia and Hong Kong to the United Kingdom and the United States. Remarkably, Happeo achieved this rapid international growth without relying on any external funding, maintaining a strong and sustainable pace that they easily could have continued on their own.

But the decision to secure eight million dollars in funding was driven by a desire to serve clients much faster and realise their product vision sooner. The founders recognised that while they were growing well, extra investment would allow them to scale operations at speed. This milestone coincided with rebranding the business to Happeo, a name reflecting their ultimate purpose of making the corporate world a happier, more efficient place to work.