January 31, 2023
When you hear the word “intranet,” chances are your mind is conjuring up images of badly designed internal communications platforms from the early aughts: a place for your internal communications team to post announcements you’re not going to read. To some degree, that hasn’t changed, but employee expectations have — and so has the work environment, especially as the pandemic has made work-from-home and hybrid work the default at many companies. And that, in turn, has made being able to communicate with employees, who increasingly feel disconnected from their jobs, even more important.
San Francisco-based Cleary is part of a new cohort of startups that aim to revitalize the intranet. The company today announced that it has raised a $4.5 million seed funding round led by Moonshots Capital. Liberty City Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Seachange Fund and Quiet Capital also participated in this round, which follows the company’s initial $3 million pre-seed round.
The company’s founders, Thomas Kunjappu and Ryan O’Donnell, previously ran Twitter’s internal people tools team (and left long before a certain billionaire acquired the company). In doing so, the founders realized that while companies like Twitter were able to build these bespoke tools for their employees, there were no comparable services on the market for all of the smaller companies that weren’t able to dedicate entire development teams to internal tools. Yet at the same time, a lot of these larger companies kept re-inventing the same tools for their employees. Read rest here.