London-based Outverse, a ‘full-stack’ community platform for modern SaaS companies, announced on Tuesday that it has secured $6M (approximately €5.4M) in a Seed round of funding led by Wing VC.
Notion Capital, Seedcamp, Connect Ventures, and Tiny VC also participated in the round.
Kyran Schmidt, co-founder of Outverse, says, “The companies that win big in the next decade will be those that proactively build closer, more authentic relationships with their user community. Outverse will offer companies a complete ecosystem for staying close to their customers, enabling a new generation of iconic products and businesses to emerge.”
What to expect?
Outverse, currently in beta, is a community product designed to cater to the needs and use cases of software companies. It empowers product teams by providing an extensible and configurable platform to connect with customers and users.
At launch, Outverse integrates with workplace essentials like Slack and Figma, with further integrations and robust API access coming later this year.
The platform leverages AI to make information easy to find and provides customers with the brand and SEO benefits of a custom domain and fully indexable discussions and knowledge base.
Leveraging LLMs is core to the Outverse vision of becoming a centralised knowledge ecosystem for software communities.
Starting with surfacing semantic relationships between content and discussions, the company is working on a range of AI-powered features, which will be rolled out over the coming months — including AI-augmented knowledge retrieval flows, along with AI-powered team and admin workflows.
What does Outverse solve?
Market shifts towards product-led growth (PLG) mean that more companies are finding community functions critical to their success.
Teams need to collect feedback, share knowledge with their users, and support customers in securing maximum value from their products.
Yet many companies are still hosting their communities on platforms that weren’t designed for this, like Slack (built for workplace chat) and Discord (built for gaming).
It makes it difficult for marketing, CX, and product teams to derive long-term value and ROI.
Here’s where Outverse comes into play!
Outverse: a ‘full-stack’ community platform
Founded in 2021 by Kyran Schmidt, Ollie Steadman, and Jeylani Jeylani, Outverse is a ‘full-stack’ community platform for modern SaaS companies.
Outverse provides an extensible, configurable platform for software companies to connect with their customers and users via focused discussion, feedback, support, and knowledge sharing.
The London-based company previously raised £1m in pre-seed funding from Seedcamp, Connect Ventures, Nicolas Julia (Founder and CEO of Sorare), Will Neale (Founder of Grabyo), Ian Hogarth (Founder of Songkick), Don Hoang (Atomico), Marc McCabe and Foreword VC.
The current team of 11 includes design, engineering, and marketing talent from Meta, Twitter, 1Password, Lyft, Multiverse, and Softr.
Zach DeWitt, Partner at Wing VC, says, “Community is becoming the epicentre for growth, product ideation, and support for modern software companies. However, existing community tools are brittle and haven’t kept up with shifting user preferences. Users are fatigued in Slack channels and overwhelmed in Discord servers. Outverse is building the community platform for the future that empowers users to do their best work and connect.”
