Working and being a part of a big organisation comes with its own set of challenges. One of the issues being lack of efficient communication in or between teams, since people tend to use a fragmented ecosystem comprising of emails, social networks and/or chat apps to convey information. Realising that there’s a market gap for a method that can enable streamlined communication within a company, the France-founded startup LumApps built “social intranet” for enterprises.
Raises €21.2M in Series B
LumApps has now raised €21.2M in Series B funding for its social Intranet. The latest round of funding was led by Idinvest, which also covered the company’s Series A funding with €7M. The startup will employ fresh funds to accelerate product development, along with the expansion of global sales and marketing.
While the freshly raised funds are signs of the company’s success, the software it makes seems to be a big hit since it has some recognised customers like Veolia, Red Energy, EA, and Logitech among others. Here is why you should keep an eye on the rapidly growing startup and what you should know about it.
What is LumApps’ ‘Social Intranet’?
LumApps was founded in 2012 as a company that offers social and mobile enterprise software solutions. Its
primary offering is a social intranet service that it says is not only social, but also collaborative and comprising of a corporate portal that is said to make top-down communication relevant and appealing to all employees of an organisation.
The company’s solution integrates with most of the prominent business apps like G Suite, Office 365, Microsoft Sharepoint, among others and can also be accessed via a smartphone. The latest successful series of funding is an indication of the company’s good growth, alongside the fact that its intranet software has on-boarded more than 4 million users globally.
How does LumApps’ social intranet work?
While we have already described what LumApps’ social intranet is, the company divides its functionality into six key areas. These areas are: Communicate and inform, enhance productivity, networking and collaboration, connect anywhere, organize and manage, and finally, integrate business apps. While each title itself gives an idea of how the social collaborative intranet works, here’s their brief breakdown.
Effective communication can make or mar entire projects. Since people in an organisation tend to communicate over different channels like email, chat or social media, the fragmentation might lead to miscommunication or a gap. LumApps creates a global style platform that can be applied for all communications. It includes content profiling where profile news, pages and business apps are available for groups of employees, along with rich communication options like custom designer content and newsletter.
Coming to enhance productivity and networking and collaboration, the service a single sign-on system with global search and personal productivity. These productivity options encompass email (Gmail and Outlook 365), calendar, files and documents and business apps. As for networking, the ‘Social intranet’ takes care of it with enabling social profile and status for its users. A user gets an activity feed and there’s also an option to follow people.
One can also access LumApps on mobile phones. It also enables monitoring analytics and as mentioned earlier, integration with business apps like G Suite, Office 365 and more.
Competes with tech giants!
LumApps compete directly with Workplace by Facebook and Yammer by Microsoft and others in the same line of social communication.The company has been steadily growing its international presence with seven offices worldwide, which are situated in Paris, London, New York, Lyon, Austin, San Francisco, and Tokyo. The company has also announced that the former EVP Sales at 3DS, Etienne Droit, and CEO of Letsignit, Damien Neyret, will be joining the company’s board of directors.
Comments from investor and founder
“Over the past year, we experienced tremendous growth with new companies across the globe adopting LumApps as their central hub for all internal and external communications,” says Sébastien Ricard, Founder and CEO of LumApps. “This new investment will help us extend our leadership position by taking our go-to-market plans to new heights and will help drive product innovation so our customers can help their employees be more productive than ever.”
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