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The news: Worknet, a startup helping enterprises integrate external communication into Slack and Microsoft Teams, emerged from stealth mode and announced $5 million in fresh cash.
The team: The Redmond, Wash.-based company is led by CEO Ami Heitner. The former SAP and Microsoft exec co-founded Komiko, a machine learning platform that gathered customer insights from email. The Seattle-based startup was acquired by ZoomInfo in 2019.
Heitner is joined by CTO Oded Breiner, the co-founder of Tel Aviv, Israel-based game publisher AppCentral, and Chief Revenue Officer Boaz Arbel, the former VP of operations at machine data analytics platform Logz.io. The company has about 10 employees between Seattle, Boston and Israel.
The idea: After Komiko was acquired, Heitner worked at ZoomInfo for more than a year. During his time at the publicly traded data company, he realized nearly all internal communication took place on Slack. This led to the revelation that a growing number of companies are shifting communications away from email, consolidating customer and partner conversations to messaging platforms like Slack Connect and Microsoft Teams.
“In the last two decades, marketing, sales and service have heavily relied on email as their primary communication tool, including us at Komiko,” Heitner told GeekWire. “However, as Slack and Microsoft Teams become the primary means of cross-company communication, the need for similar tools will arise.”
The product: Worknet syncs with customer-relationship management (CRM) systems like Salesforce and Zendesk. The plugin lets users send bulk messages, reaching multiple channels and individuals for news like product updates or outages.
Worknet’s AI tools create insights and instructions based on back-and-forth messages, capturing insights like response times, customer health scores, sentiment analysis, and more. Additionally, the tool processes messages by identifying the relevant employee within the organization, generates thread summaries, rephrases and condenses messages, and sets response reminders.
The competition: There are a number of companies building customer engagement tech to integrate with messaging platforms. Early-stage startups like Unthread and Pylon both develop tools that synch with CRM systems; Palo Alto, Calif.-based Thena recently raised $5 million from Lightspeed and First Round Capital; and DevRev, launched by Nutanix founder Dheeraj Pandey, which is developing its own customer messaging platform that integrates with Slack, GitHub, Jira and Salesforce.
Slack also has its own GPT plugin for writing assistance and conversation summaries.
Worknet primarily focuses on serving business-to-business tech companies with more than 20 enterprise clients including Bill, Monday, Monte Carlo, Airbyte, and Certinia.
The funders: The seed and pre-seed round included participation from Act One Ventures and Founders’ Co-Op.
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