{"id":43825,"date":"2023-10-20T15:31:26","date_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:31:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/startupsmart.test\/2023\/10\/20\/its-all-in-the-culture-melbourne-based-startup-culture-amp-secures-8-million-in-series-a-funding-startupsmart\/"},"modified":"2023-10-20T15:31:26","modified_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:31:26","slug":"its-all-in-the-culture-melbourne-based-startup-culture-amp-secures-8-million-in-series-a-funding-startupsmart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/uncategorized\/its-all-in-the-culture-melbourne-based-startup-culture-amp-secures-8-million-in-series-a-funding-startupsmart\/","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s all in the culture \u2013 Melbourne-based startup Culture Amp secures $8 million in Series A funding – StartupSmart"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Workplace culture analytics startup Culture Amp has raised $US6.3 million ($A8.1 million) in Series A funding led by Felicis Ventures, Index Ventures and Blackbird Ventures.<\/p>\n

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The Melbourne-based startup\u2019s technology platform allows companies to collect data about their employees through customisable surveys, helping them make better decisions about people and culture. Companies are given the option to offer their insights anonymously, which Culture Amp then uses to compile industry standard benchmark reports that contributing companies get access to.<\/p>\n

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Co-founder and chief executive officer Didier Elzinga says the capital will help the company grow its customer base 500% over the next year.<\/p>\n

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\u201cLast year we doubled. We doubled head count, we doubled customers and we doubled revenue. We were bootstrapped, so we were very happy with that. But we sat down and said, what we\u2019re doing, it really is starting to work. We\u2019ve got clients that work. Amazingly powerful data. If we kept doing what we\u2019re doing we\u2019d get to 1000 customers in about two or three years,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

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\u201cIt\u2019s an arbitrary number, but at some level 1000 customers is a level of critical mass that amounts to some really interesting stuff. And so we just started asking ourselves what would it look like if we tried to get there in a year.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Currently, the startup has about 200 companies using its platform, among them tech giants Airbnb, Uber, Pandora, Adobe, Pinterest, Warby Parker, Lyft, Etsy and GoDaddy.<\/p>\n

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\u201cIn tech and fast growing companies we just found a natural starting point. Part of the reason is with their growth rates, they\u2019re doing in three years what everybody else is doing in 10,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

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\u201cOne of the things we\u2019ve seen is a lot of investment in the pre-hire market. How do you win and attract great talent? What we\u2019re starting to see now is you have to spend at least as much in the post-hire market because now you\u2019ve won all these people.\u201d<\/p>\n

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While tools that help companies understand and gather data on their customers have been around for a while, Elzinga says less attention has been paid to understanding employees.<\/p>\n

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\u201cIf you think about the last 10 or 15 years about the way companies use data from their customers to change their organisation, there\u2019s been a torrent of innovation,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

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\u201cBut if you stop and say our customers are a really powerful and important group of people that can tell us a lot about our company. There\u2019s also another group of people, the people that work for us. So the starting point for us, about three years ago, was to say, why do the marketers get all the fun. Why can\u2019t we help a VP of people or a head of HR do something in this space to collect data in a way that\u2019s easier and more effective to use.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The startup found Felicis Ventures particularly appealing as an investor because they subscribed to the notion of a global startup. That\u2019s important to Culture Amp, because while it does have offices in Silicon Valley, it plans on keeping its headquarters in Australia and building its product team there.<\/p>\n

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\u201cThey didn\u2019t say to us \u2018we love this idea but you\u2019ll have to move to the Valley\u2019,\u201d Elzinga says.<\/p>\n

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\u201cWe\u2019re committed to building a product team in Melbourne and they were totally fine with that. It wasn\u2019t until after we\u2019d finished the deal that I was talking to a couple of other people and we thought we don\u2019t know many Australian companies that have raised Series A that haven\u2019t had to move to the US. So we\u2019re proud of that.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Disclosure: StartupSmart\u2019s Editor-at-large Bronwen Clune is head of content and communications at Culture Amp.<\/i><\/p>\n

Follow StartupSmart on<\/i> Facebook<\/i>,<\/i> Twitter<\/i>, and<\/i> LinkedIn<\/i>.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Workplace culture analytics startup Culture Amp has raised $US6.3 million ($A8.1 million) in Series A funding led by Felicis Ventures,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":59583,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43825"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43825"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43825\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/59583"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}