A new San Francisco-based startup has raised $1.1 million in seed financing with a new take on messaging and polling for businesses.
The company takes its name from the informative dance that bees in a hive conduct to communicate with their fellows.
At Waggl, executives can post queries to their employees for internal discussion through the service, and then have users determine what responses are the best through a polling mechanism.
Launched in February as a spin-out from Fort Hill Company, Waggl is backed by a slew of individual investors including Jeff Snipes, founder and chief executive of Ninth House; Robert Hohman, the former president of Hotwire and founder of Glassdoor; James Gutierrez, the founder of Progreso Financiero; Ignace Goethals, a president of Smithkline Beecham’s animal health group; and Joe Abrams, a co-founder of Software Toolworks and Intermix, who joins the company as a director.
Companies and organizations that have signed up for the service include, Sanofi, Kaiser Permanente, and the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
“The funding we’ve raised will help us meet product development requests and enhance our platform even further, as well as expand our customer base internationally,” said Michael Papay, Waggl’s chief executive in a statement.
The company also says it has a partnership with Affero Lab, a human resources firm in Brazil to expand its presence in Latin America.
Waggl has also partnered with Affero Lab – the largest human capital management firm in Brazil and lead distributor of SuccessFactors in South America – to expand the platforms’ offering outside of the U.S.
The company is entering a pretty crowded market. Slack raised over $42 million earlier this month to expand its presence in the market; and that company is competing with Microsoft-owned Yammer and Convo.