WorkSnug, the location-based service for mobile workers, has raised £110k in funding from nine UK-based Angel investors. Yes, you read that correct, nine separate investors, which seems a little extreme for what from the outside looks like a seed round.
However, in actual fact, WorkSnug has generated revenue almost from the get-go through partnerships with Plantronics, Cisco, Skype and, most recently, HP. Having launched its app globally over a year ago, the London-based startup is only now taking funding in order to step on the gas as it were by launching on more mobile platforms (beyond iPhone and BlackBerry) and broadening its offering. Interestingly, this could include helping mobile workers not just locate places to co-work and other resources but, eventually, people. Thus unlocking the serendipitous or dare I say temporal social networks that potentially exist in places frequented by mobile workers hunched over laptops. It’s not hard to imagine how that could create all sorts of exciting opportunities.
The full list of Angels is impressive too. It includes Niall Murphy, who co-founded The Cloud (which recently sold to Sky) and has been a “strategic voice” within WorkSnug and effectively a co-founder from day one; Sean Phelan, who founded Multimap, which exited to Microsoft; prominent UK Angel Julian Ranger; and Peter Cowley, who was recently named Investment Director at the new Cambridge-based fund ‘Martlet’. The remaining investors are also Cambridge-based as members of The Cambridge Angels group, which focuses on high-tech start-ups around the “Cambridge Technology Cluster”. As part of the investment John Yeomans also joins WorkSnug’s board.
With the extra capital in-hand, immediate in WorkSnug’s road map are apps for Nokia (Symbian) and Android. These are likely to mirror the functionality of the company’s existing iPhone app which uses Augmented Reality to let mobile workers locate potential working spaces – coffee shops, libraries, formal co-working spaces and Wi-Fi hotspots etc. – and provides ratings on Internet connectivity, “community feel”, power sockets and even the quality of coffee.
And while finding a place to work will remain WorkSnug’s “anchor use case”, the plan, says founder and Managing Director Richard Leyland, is to build other useful functionality on top. “Think booking a meeting room, recommendations, who might I like to meet around me, or free coffee“.
Free coffee, you say?
I’m sold.