Denmark-registered Butter, a Zoom-like video platform for online meetings and workshops, has raised $3.2M (approx €2.69M) in its Seed round of funding. The startup aims to empower workshop facilitators to host virtual workshops which it believes are better than their physical ones.
The raised capital will be used for building out a full workshop suite that allows facilitators to prepare, run, and manages the entire workshop directly from Butter.
Butter’s investors
The current Seed round was led by Project A, the premium Seed & Series A European fund, along with several angel investors, including Des Traynor (co-founder of Intercom); Johannes Schildt (co-founder of KRY/LIVI); Mads Fosselius (co-founder of Dixa); Ron Cohen (co-founder of Opbeat – Acq. by Elastic); Neil Murray of Nordic Web Ventures; Ross Sheil (head of Startup Partners at Stripe); Christian Jantzen (Futuristic.vc); Bjarke Staun (Angel investor and Ex-principal at Creandum); Joe Tsai (Angel investor and ex-McKinsey and Thibault Reichelt); and, Peter Livingston from Unpopular.vc.
Meanwhile, Morph Capital invested in their pre-seed round, and on top of it, Butter also received soft funding from Vaekstfonden and Innovation Fund Denmark.
The pain points of running workshops
Butter is a fully distributed remote company with people from Asia, Europe, Africa, and the US. The startup was founded by three seasoned startup founders including Jakob Knutzen, Christopher Holm-Hansen (both are Danish), and Adam Wan (Malaysian).
The founders had previously founded StreamCrux, a game streaming community startup, which they eventually decided to shut down in early 2020. Despite the early setback, they stuck together to work on different startup ideas such as remotecamp.io, which provided workshops to help companies cultivate a remote-first culture when COVID started.
The founders among them had experience in facilitating hundreds of workshops from their past careers in strategy consulting and design agencies. But through RemoteCamp, they experienced firsthand how painful online workshops can be. And, this is what inspired them to launch Butter.
Butter – an all-in-one workshop app
The team behind Butter aims to own the future of remote workshop collaboration by building a full suite – owning the before, during, and after the workshop. Their goal is to bridge the pros of going digital with the flow and energy of physical workshops, therefore making virtual workshops better than physical ones.
The startup also claims to have built for facilitators who are frustrated with needing to switch between different tools in one session during a workshop. “We focus on empowering facilitators and hosts by giving them all the tools they need in one place and engaging participants through intuitive features such as the speaker queue and emoji reactions to make everyone feel heard,” according to the company’s website.
The platform helps set up the workshop through collaboration tools like Miro and Google Drive, presettable agenda, polls and breakout rooms, and interactive elements like reactions and chat where participants can easily be engaged. It can support up to 200 people in total during a session.
It’s an all-in-one workshop video app built specifically for strategy consultants, design sprinters, HR trainers, among others, who aim to host a workshop. The platform allows hosts to energise sessions with ease as well as put the focus back into hosting great sessions and less on managing multiple tools.
Recent growth
Founded in 2020, Butter is banking on the growth of the billion-dollar software collaboration market. The startup claims to define workshops as complex sessions where people collaborate towards clear outcomes.
Jakob Knutzen, a co-founder of Butter, says, “Remote complex collaboration is here to stay. We believe that COVID truly showed to the world that we’re able to work together, even though we’re not sitting next to each other. With Butter, we’re building the future of remote collaboration.”
Butter’s growth was further accelerated as the pandemic pushed companies to host workshops and events remotely – a trend that the company expects will continue even after the world normalises again.
