$43M to challenge the status quo of workplace experience!

I don’t know about you, but I find it pretty hard to get excited about a typical thermostat. It’s big and clunky, the white plastic has a way of turning beige over time, it makes loud clicking noises in the middle of the night… it’s really just not that great. Yet these no-frills thermostats are what most of us have in our homes because that’s what the industry offered us to get the job done.

But then along came the Nest thermostat and forced us to completely rethink that industry. It came with a beautiful design, it guessed when you got home from work and started the heating before you got there, it could be turned off remotely when you realized you left your heating on when on vacation, it was just incredibly helpful. This new thermostat wasn’t just practical, it was convenient, saved people money, integrated with a bunch of other things around the home and was something you could actually enjoy and get excited about. Today, thanks to an entire Smart Home initiative stemming from experiences like this, we get all sorts more innovations: mood lighting, WiFi scales, automated garage doors, smart locks and security systems, doorbells with video, and oh so much more. The future really is here!

Well, the future is here at home. The office or workplace though? That’s a different story. Though we’ve helped modernize over 10,000 lobbies with automated iPad-based sign-in, and started bringing some order to the chaos of the mailroom, the rest of the workplace remains largely untouched: people are losing their keys/badges (and being locked out of their office!), meeting rooms are reserved but are unoccupied, lights/heating are left on after-hours, there’s all sorts of out-of-place things that nobody’s reporting, etc. Where are the products to fix all those things? And to unify them all together.

It’s because of this exact situation that I’m excited to announce we have raised a Series B of $43M led by Menlo Ventures, with follow-on from Initialized Capital and Andreessen Horowitz! Joining our board will be Matt Murphy from Menlo and Andrew Chen from a16z. What’ll the capital be used for? We’re going to significantly invest in building products aimed at challenging the status quo of the workplace! Thanks to our tremendously helpful and insightful customers, we’ve learned that Envoy contributes to much more than just practical security and efficiency needs—it helps them transform the workplace experience. So this got us thinking: I bet you that these 10,000 workplaces have many other problems we could help with too.

The expectations of the workplace are changing. People are expecting the same focus on experience from the software they use at work and they won’t put up with functionality alone. Businesses have come to understand this: if people don’t enjoy using something, it won’t be adopted, and it likely won’t last. That’s why we here at Envoy build for experience. The workplace experience is a cause that impacts just about everyone and we’re incredibly proud to be able to focus such time and energy on building products that people—employees and visitors—actually enjoy using.

This isn’t easy, but if done right, it’ll be incredibly impactful and at massive scale. We’re looking for like-minded folks to join us in transforming all of the allegedly-boring things around the office into products people can get excited about. We’re hiring just about every role and growing our team of almost 100 to efficiently and systematically challenge the status quo of the workplace! The world will thank you. 🙂

🚀

—Larry Gadea, CEO of Envoy