Ask kindly is the latest company to attract capital to its app geared towards the success of shift or frontline workers as more and more companies are rightly realizing how valuable those people are to their bottom line and how technology can ensure that these key people are empowered will help the company grow.
Aaron Ward, CEO of AskNicely. Credit: Ask kindly
The Portland, Oregon-based company with its technology team in New Zealand began developing its SaaS customer experience management tools for people-dependent businesses in 2014, co-founder and CEO Aaron Ward told TechCrunch. The tools incorporate Net Promoter Score, workflow, recognition and feedback, coaching and insights to help businesses be led by their frontline people.
“We have been taught in the past that companies work top-down, but we know that the signal is often lost,” he added. “The ‘magic’ is to always activate these signals and to share feedback and give coaching are daily things, not just those that happen quarterly or once a month.”
Today the company announced a $ 32 million Series B financing round led by Five Elms Capital with the participation of existing investors Nexus Venture Partners and Blackbird. Five Elms’ Ryan Mandl joins AskNicely’s board of directors as part of the funding.
The new capital gives AskNicely a total of $ 47 million in fundraising. It had previously increased its Serie A in January 2019, and Ward said the driver behind the search for additional capital was in part the global pandemic. Many of its service customers then closed their doors and the company wondered if it was time to turn around. Instead, AskNicely has doubled its mission and taken the time during the pandemic to invest in the product and its marketing, he added.
Those efforts paid off for the company, and Ward was able to take these early results to capital markets, who saw this as a new technology for a class of workers previously largely ignored by technology, he said.
Ward believes that if you take the time to focus on the company, AskNicely has an edge over the rest of the market.
“We were the first to put it on the market and focus on changing technology for this working class,” he added. “The new capital will allow us to dig deeper into product development and invest in sales and marketing as we prepare to launch and get our platform out there.”
With 80% of the world’s working population Ward is seen as a front line worker in industries like retail, hospitality, and healthcare, Ward says the market opportunity is enormous. Companies that are also raising venture capital to reverse this underserved market include flash, an app that enables frontline workers to use and interact with the various IT services used by their organizations as well as each other. Shift smart, a marketplace that connects shift workers with employers, has raised $ 95 million during the messaging app When I am working completed a huge round – $ 200 million. In the meantime, Fountain raised $ 85 million and Seasoned grabbed $ 18.7 million for his restaurant worker tool. We saw earlier this year Home base, which raised $ 71 million earlier this year, and Workiz, which focuses on home service professionals, raised $ 13 million.
AskNicely has over 60 employees and plans to double that number over the next year. Ward wouldn’t say anything about company revenue other than saying that the company is a “strong SaaS company.” He revealed that AskNicely has 1,300 customers, mostly in North America, Australia and Europe, and that sales price has come to the point that “every new customer today is worth ten times more than we have in the past. ”
“We’re here to see how frontline people work, and over the past 24 months companies have seen a new appreciation for what they’ve done,” said Ward. “They are underserved by technology and, frankly, underestimated, underpaid and underestimated. We help them succeed, but we cannot do it alone. We need to build a movement to link arms with coalition partners and partner with other actors to make a difference. “
