Business Venture

Spike Aims To Reimagine Employee Collaboration With Help From $8M Series A

Illustration of remote worker on Zoom meeting.

With everyone collaborating virtually these days as a result of COVID-19, most employees are using email, an antiquated technology, but one that still gets the job done.

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Spike, a conversational work ecosystem, is taking email and mixing it with instant messaging features to provide a suite of new, real-time communication and workflow capabilities. A task now powered by an $8 million Series A round of funding led by Insight Partners.

Existing investors that participated in this funding round, announced Thursday, included Wix, NFX and Koa Labs. Following this Series A investment round, the Israel-based company has raised a total of nearly $16 million to date, which includes several seed rounds over the past seven years, the most recent a $5 million round in March 2019, led by Wix, according to Crunchbase data. As part of the investment, Insight Partners’ Vice President Daniel Aronovitz will join Spike’s board of directors.

As homes became workplaces for more people, investors also recently saw potential in startups similarly helping keep employees connected. Last month, we reported about RemoteHQ, a virtual office platform that raised a $2.7 million seed round, as well as Workvivo, which secured a $16 million Series A to turn emails into engaging content.

Reinventing email

Spike, founded in 2013, brings functions together, such as chat, calendar, calls, document sharing, note-taking, video and tasks, into one place—an email inbox—so that users don’t have to switch between applications or tabs, Dvir Ben-Aroya, Spike co-founder and CEO, told Crunchbase News.

Spike’s inbox platform

“Email is one of the unique identifiers in the digital world, but it was invented 50 years ago and hasn’t changed much since then,” Ben-Aroya said. “The biggest advantage is that it is not owned by anyone, so we are leveraging email in a modern way—reinventing it—to combine it with everything we need in one inbox.”

The new funding will be used to accelerate growth, build out additional tools and services and double the size of its team within the next year, Ben-Aroya said.

Some of the new features coming online Thursday include notes, tasks and collaboration capabilities.

“Everything is drag-and-drop, you can comment on a document in real time and send a link to someone outside Spike who can collaborate with you, as well,” he said. “These are all things to help you manage your time and activities, unifying and modernizing your workflow.”

Insight Partners’ Aronovitz said via email that Spike is addressing a market seeking digital collaboration tools, made more important with greater remote teams.

“We think email will remain ubiquitous and a critical communication channel,” he said. “Spike offers a differentiated application relative to competitors given the breadth of email integration and productivity tools enabling a single, unified workspace.”

Illustration: Dom Guzman
Photo courtesy of Spike

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