Back in February, when TechCrunch spoke to Raphael Akinsipe, he described his company SocialCrowd as a “Fitbit but for work.” As CEO and co-founder, he explained that the product allows companies to set goals for employees and then reward them when those expectations are met.
“For example, we had a restaurant incentivize their staff by rewarding them $1 for every five daily specials sold,” Akinsipe told us recently. “And in 90 days their sales grew 490%.”
At the time, he was announcing a $1.6 million pre-seed, led by Bread and Butter Ventures. But after some growth and traction, he’s back again to announce the closing of a $2.5 million seed round, co-led by Bread and Butter Ventures and Augment Ventures.
The company knew after it closed its pre-seed that it would raise another round to meet consumer demand. “We have seen incredible growth across verticals, we knew we would need to expand our engineering, customer success, and sales,” Akinsipe told TechCrunch.
Employers had to become more creative during the pandemic to retain their employees and that mentality hasn’t necessarily gone away. Early on, Akinsipe said the company had a large focus on restaurants, but that it has now expanded to focus on working with companies that overall have a large hourly blue-collar workforce, like retail and manufacturing. Now, SocialCrowd is growing at an average of 20% a month growth, he said, but he declined to offer more specific such as any kind of a revenue metric.
Employers aren’t the only ones paying attention to performance management software. Investors, too, have always invested heavily in the space. Business and productivity software companies have raised $41.9 billion so far in venture funding this year, of course, that is down from the record $67.6 billion raised in 2021, which is slightly more than the $36.3 billion raised last year, according to Pitchbook data.
“We had incredibly strong interest in our round from top-flight investors. We were able to close our round in just a couple of months,” Akinsipe said. He thinks continued interest in this sector comes from employers still facing problems with retention and optimization, while interest in his company comes from the fact that “our team has demonstrated a strong ability to execute on product and sales.”
FullCircle, Serac Ventures, and VC414 also participated in SocialCrowd’s latest funding round.
“We have remained bullish on ‘the future of work’ as a category throughout the fluctuations of the market and remote vs. in-person cycles of the last few years,” Mary Grove, managing partner of Bread and Butter Ventures, told TechCrunch. “One area, in particular, we see with huge potential to invest in is technology that improves worker and employer experiences for frontline and shift workers, a group that is hugely important to the backbone sectors of the US and global economy. SocialCrowd is a great example of a company building at the core of this opportunity.”
Competitors in this space include Bonsuly and Awardco, though Akinsipe says SocialCrowd is different in that it focuses exclusively on the frontline and shift workers, and that its platform is more performance-based rather than sentiment-based, where managers gift awards based on feelings.
SocialCrowd’s latest funding round is going to once again help it expand its engineering and customer success team, as well as help it further expand verticals. There is a plan, of course, to even expand into AI.