Employee sentiment can be hard to gauge, even at smaller businesses. This can lead to burnout and attrition when managers least expect it.
To solve that problem, inFeedo wants to act as a bridge between workers and their managers, with surveys performed through a chatbot called Amber, which inFeedo refers to as a “chief listening officer.”
The company announced today it has raised $12 million in Series A funding led by Jungle Ventures, with participation from Tiger Global and returning investors like Bling Capital.
This brings inFeedo’s total raised since the U.S.-headquartered company was founded in 2016 to $16 million. Part of the funding will be used for the company’s second ESOP buyback for all employees. Other investors in the round included Zeta founder Bhavin Turakhia, Gainsight co-founder Sreedhar Peddineni, Freshworks chief human resources officer Suman Gopalan, and Ankur Warikoo.
Amber, inFeedo’s chatbot, is available in more than 100 languages, and customers include a wide range of companies in terms of sizes and sector: Samsung, Xiaomi, Lenovo, TATA, Godrej, Bharti, Unacademy, Paytm, OYO, Lenovo, JD.ID., Tiket.com, Mediacom, Sunlife, BukuWarung and Aboitiz. In total, Amber is used by 30,000 employees in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines. The company has 175 enterprise clients in 60 countries, especially Southeast Asia, India and the U.S., and it plans to speed up its go-to-market plans in North America with its new funding.
Tanmaya Jain, who founded inFeedo with Varun Puri, told TechCrunch the idea for the platform was planted when the two were still at school.
“Both Varun and I came from liberal schools and the general concept of a university was a big culture shock. People were encouraged to follow a template rather than think, and new ideas were often ignored, shot down or lost.”
They found that this continued at workplaces, and that employees often felt “neglected, under-appreciated and were afraid to open up and share honest feedback with managers, which led to disengagement and attrition.”
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After doing research, the two realized that companies do care about employee sentiment, but struggle to stay on top of it. “When you have an HR:employee ratio of 1:300, 40% of their time is spent manually tracking, collecting and analyzing feedback, and it becomes humanly impossible to give employees the voice they need,” Jain said. While many organizations use annual or pulse surveys, inFeedo was created to standardize surveys across domains and cultures, he added.
Amber also builds connections with employees by remembering context from previous chats. Employees can engage with the chatbot as often as they like, but Jain said they typically have three to four chats with Amber in a year. Each conversation is about eight questions long and takes no more than two and a half minutes to answer.
The new funding will be used to ship new products over the next two years, with the “vision of an all-in-one employee experience platform with predictive people analytics that involve 0 effort HR/IT,” said Jain. The company also plans to quadruple its revenue and double its team, and is currently hiring for 140 remote roles, especially marketing, product, engineering and sales in Southeast Asia, India and the United States.
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