London-based startup Unlock offers a SaaS-enabled marketplace that creates healthy culture habits for remote teams. Today, the company has announced that it has raised $2M (approx €1.73M) in its Seed round of funding. The investment was led by La Famiglia, with other investors including Kima Ventures, Antler, GuideStar Ventures.
In addition, well-known angel investors also participated in this round. They include Eduardo Ronzano, Thibaud Elziere, Frederic Montagnon, Julien Romanetto, Nicolas Steegmann, Philipp Moehring, Andy Chung, Ville Vesterinen and Deepali Nangia from Atomico Angel Network, Richard Faern, Ian Hathaway, Lu Li, co-founders of Personio and Foodora, VP Product at Malt and more.
The pain point of the industry
With the pandemic, organisations are in need of employee engagement platforms that are keen on providing more support to remote workforces. Strong team culture is key to attracting and retaining talent in a more and more heated labour market.
And with the increase in hybrid forms of work, companies now need to plan and think of digitally-inclusive ways to create emotional attachment and loyalty among their teams.
This is where Unlock looks to operate. The company claims to tackle what it believes to be a core part of this new battleground in the war for talent – culture and belonging.
Maria Wlosinska, co-founder and CEO of Unlock says, “We’re in the midst of a culture shift. The companies we work with realise that in order to stay ahead in the talent war, they have to put a strong culture at the core, but that’s not always easy to do in practice. At Unlock, we know that with the right tools and content, gathering as a team online can be easy, engaging and really fun.”
“Real connections for virtual teams”
Founded in 2019 by Maria Wlosinska, Darshak Bhatt, and Eli Rezinsky, Unlock is a cloud-based software for virtual collaboration space. It provides a platform to build real-time connections with teammates as well as allows users to play games with each other and to explore wellness activities.
The company claims to build digital healthy remote team cultural habits through fun activities while adding a new source of revenue for virtual event creators.
Maria Wlosinska explains, “By providing the cultural infrastructure for companies, they don’t have to spend hours researching and managing how to drive culture in their teams. We make sure there is enough content variability within our platform and the experiences on Unlock are curated to feel refreshing and inspiring for teams to come back regularly.”
Wlosinska further adds, “From a product perspective, we believe that in order to create a more genuine social experience online we need to control the venue and its interactiveness. Generic video calls can very easily feel like a classroom experience, whereas we wanted to build a truly interactive team experience. It’s that combination of content variability, ease of use and the interactive elements that our customers appreciate most.”
Companies can also choose to get personalised cultural calendars consisting of a range of different activities every month.
Currently, the platform already has 300+ purpose-built bite-size conversation starters and games, and 50+ curated experiences from virtual activity creators – ranging from an origami lesson hosted from Tokyo to an interactive songwriting session hosted by a professional band.
