iObeya Raises $17M To Expand in US

As workplaces continue to be remote, iObeya is helping multisite teams collaborate in a virtual environment, now boosted by a $17 million round of new funding.

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The investment, the France-based company’s second round of funding, was led by Red River West with participation from Atlantic Bridge Capital and Fortino Capital Partners. iObeya has secured a total of $20 million in funding since its inception in 2011 by Cyril Daloz and Julien Revel.

“A decade or more ago, digital whiteboarding tools ushered in an era of visual collaboration,” Luc-Emmanuel Barreau, partner at Red River West, said in a written statement. “Today, iObeya represents a new vanguard that is poised to define the era of visual management.”

Tim McCracken, who leads the company’s new U.S. headquarters in Seattle, told Crunchbase News that the funding would go to further development of the platform, as well as iObeya’s global expansion, beginning in the United States.

“We’ve already captured much of France, so the next move was to have an infrastructure in the U.S., to set up sales and support to capture the momentum we have seen, especially around COVID-19,” McCracken added.

iObeya had been growing prior to the pandemic, with hundreds of thousands of users, but in January, demand for the platform was up by more than 400 percent, he said. The company began offering a subscription model a few years ago and was close to hyper-growth, as well as expanding revenue.

The company was spending most of its time on research and development, but the new investment is also giving iObeya a “power boost” to its sales business to expand customers, McCracken added.

Now that the U.S. office is set up and iObeya is adding more personnel, it will be working on the next generation of software features and functions, as well as integration with third-party applications.

“COVID-19 delayed us a little bit with the U.S. office, but were able to manage it from inside France,” McCracken said. “The setup in the Seattle area came at the perfect time to help customers address this crisis.”

Illustration: Dom Guzman