As we go deeper into the pandemic, companies are looking for ways to digitize processes that previously required face-to-face meetings with manual approaches. Investors appear to be rewarding companies who can achieve this. iObeya, a French company that helps digitize management planning processes as streamlined and agile, today announced a $ 17 million Serie A match.
Red River West led the round with the help of Atlantic Bridge Capital and Fortino Capital Partners. He has now raised a total of $ 20 million, according to the company.
Tim McCracken, who directs the company's operations in the United States, says the name derives from the Japanese word for the large room where companies have done all their planning. Many companies gather a group of people in a conference room and line the walls with sticky notes and whiteboards with their plans for the coming weeks and months.
Even before the pandemic, it wasn't the most effective way to record this valuable corporate content and iObeya has developed a service to bring it into the digital realm. "And so one of the things they did with those obeya rooms was that they had a lot of different visual management tips with post-its and with different types of indicators that they would use to run their business. And so what iObeya does is digitize that type of visual management, so that you can access it from multiple locations and share it between teams and substantially eliminate the need to do it on paper and on walls, "explained McCracken.
This involves the digitization of four main areas which include lean management, warehouse management, agile programming and, finally, what they call the digital workplace, which includes design thinking, the virtual whiteboard and brainstorming. All of these approaches have a lot of associated planning and could benefit from online transfer.
100 employees are approaching with the majority in France right now with a small office in the United States in Seattle, but they will use this money to expand with plans to add another 50. He says the company has always looked at diversity when it comes to his hiring practices.
"We want to try to attract not only experienced salespeople, but also the support organization around them, but also to do a lot of action in the local community to see how we can ensure that our workforce reflects the community," he said.
As the company had to close offices due to COVID-19, McCracken says that its software has helped them make the transition smoother. "We actually use our software to manage business, so we have had very few interruptions in our real work. At the same time, the volume of work has probably increased four to five times, simply because of the increased demand for software. So we had to manage not only the transition from office work to home work, but also the increase in workload, "he said.
The company was founded near Paris in 2011. They plan to use the money to expand operations in the United States and raise awareness of the company through increased sales and marketing spending.
