Increasing productivity can range from simple fixes such as turning notifications off on the phone to more complex steps such as blocking social media websites. But for those who work on spreadsheets, increasing productivity is a whole different ball game. It’s more to do with better workflows and collaboration. Keeping this in mind, the Berlin-based startup Layer offers a remarkable productivity boosting solution while working with Google Sheets or Excel. The company has now announced securing €5 million in a seed round.
Supercharge your spreadsheets!
The process of creating and managing complex, business-critical spreadsheets workflows can be extremely difficult. Businesses rely heavily on spreadsheets for critical processes such as financial planning, reporting, and forecasting. However, these spreadsheets are often fragile and can break easily. On top of that, they can consume hours from highly paid employees on repetitive, mundane tasks, managing contributions over emails, and copy-pasting between files.
The startup Layer deals with all the aforementioned complications and frustrations related to spreadsheets in a simple and efficient manner. The company’s offering adds new collaboration and workflow features on top of existing spreadsheets. With Layer, one gets granular access and can share certain parts of their file, from cell ranges to entire tabs. It also allows automation to take care of repetitive tasks, tracking changes, and versioning. The web app doesn’t require any additional plugins or installations and sits on top of your existing Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets files.
Layer co-founder Constantin Schünemann says, “Spreadsheets are prevalent in nearly every organisation globally, regardless of size and they are not going anywhere. Yet, spreadsheets haven’t changed much in decades. Talk to anyone trying to collaborate with their colleagues on complex spreadsheets, and you will encounter a frustrated user. Having experienced this ourselves, we knew there must be a better way, and that’s what we are building in Layer.”
Backers of Dropbox, Pitch and Slack invest in Layer
Layer has raised €5 million in a Seed funding round, which was led by Index Ventures with participation from earlier backers btov Partners. Old investors were joined by new angel investors which include Ajay Vashee (CFO at Dropbox), Carlos Gonzales-Cadenaz (COO of GoCardless), Felix Jahn (founder and CEO of McMakler), Matt Robinson (founder of GoCardless and Nested) and Max Tayenthal (co-founder and CFO of N26).
Index Ventures’ Max Rimpel says, “Spreadsheets are one of the most successful UI’s ever created, but they’ve been built primarily for a single user, not for large distributed organisations with many teams and departments inputting data to a single document. Just as GitHub has helped developers contribute seamlessly to a single code base, Layer is now bringing sophisticated collaboration tools to the one billion spreadsheet users across the globe.”
Layer is currently available in private beta and its public launch is expected in 2021. One can register for early access here.
Cover image credits: Layer