CrunchFund, Angels Back Flowdock, A Group Chat Application For Teams

Leena Rao

Leena Rao is currently a Senior Editor for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... → Learn More

Wednesday, November 9th, 2011
flow

Flowdock, a group chat application for teams and businesses, has raises $650,000 in seed funding from Gil Penchina, CrunchFund, Marten Mickos, and IDG Ventures.

Flowdock, which aims to disrupt the group chat space, is a collaboration web app for technical teams. As we wrote in our initial review of Flowdock, the startup brings activity from your project management tools (Pivotal Tracker, JIRA), version control systems (GitHub, BitBucket, Kiln), customer feedback channels (Zendesk, email lists) and many other sources to a single stream. Team can then work on the issues together, chat about problems, and react in seconds.

The virtue of using the products is that it allows development teams to track, archive and act on real-time chat, a key functionality which is missing from many collaboration or chat applications.

For example, a customer service team using Zendesk cannot resolve a development issue by themselves. They can escalate it to the development team’s Flowdock and the development team can then discuss and resolve the issue in minutes. Normally, this sort of correspondence is done over email or even Skype, and takes longer to resolve.

The product, which is available via the web and a desktop app, includes real-time group chat, the ability to upload files, notifications, and more. There’s a free 30-day trial for Flowdock, and paid plans range from $19 per month to $159 per month.

The startup has already seen a pickup in customers, and counts Pivotal Labs, TED conferences, and Appcelerator as users. Flowdock faces competition from Hipchat and others.


Company: Flowdock
Website: flowdock.com
Launch Date: December 23, 2009
Funding: $650k

Flowdock is your team’s shared inbox with group chat. Teams using Flowdock stay up-to-date, react in seconds instead of hours, and never forget anything. Flowdock brings activity from your project management tools (Pivotal Tracker, JIRA), version control systems (GitHub, BitBucket, Kiln), customer feedback channels (Zendesk, email lists) and many other sources to an easily consumable stream. Team can then work on the issues together, and react in seconds. When there’s something worth remembering, #tag it in Flowdock! You’ll easily find those memos,...

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