Unlock secures £1.5m in seed funding led by La Famiglia to scale its remote team culture platform.
La Famiglia led the seed investment, which featured backing from several prominent angel investors and venture firms.
Unlock operates a software enabled marketplace designed to help remote teams build workplace culture through curated virtual activities and events.
Unlock, a UK-based provider of cultural infrastructure for remote teams, has secured £1.5m in a seed round led by La Famiglia. The financing attracted participation from a range of firms including Kima Ventures, Antler, GuideStar Ventures, and numerous angel investors. The fresh capital will support the company as it scales its operations in the rapidly expanding employee engagement sector.
The pandemic has accelerated demand for digital tools that foster team cohesion across distributed workforces. Unlock addresses this by combining a flexible video venue with a marketplace of curated virtual experiences and icebreakers, helping organisations improve staff retention and satisfaction.
From the founder
"We’re in the midst of a culture shift. The companies we work with realise that in order to stay ahead in the talent war, they have to put a strong culture at the core, but that’s not always easy to do in practice. At Unlock, we know that with the right 1 Pitchbook, European Venture Report Q2 2021tools and content, gathering as a team online can be easy, engaging and really fun. By providing the cultural infrastructure for companies, they don’t have to spend hours researching and managing how to drive culture in their teams. We make sure there is enough content variability within our platform and the experiences on Unlock are curated to feel refreshing and inspiring for teams to come back regularly. From a product perspective, we believe that in order to create a more genuine social experience online we need to control the venue and its interactiveness. Generic video calls can very easily feel like a classroom experience, whereas we wanted to build a truly interactive team experience. It’s that combination of content variability, ease of use and the interactive elements that our customers appreciate most."
Maria Wlosinska
Co-Founder and CEO at Unlock
Investor perspective
"We are at the dawn of the Golden Age of the Employee: in the ever fiercer fight for talent, the cultural empowerment of employees is one of the biggest levers companies have on their quest to being successful, but also a real challenge for fully remote, hybrid, or geographically distributed teams. Given their remote team setup and expertise in the space of team culture, we felt Unlock had a unique insight to solving this challenge. Firstly, they bring individuals who are experts in driving meaningful team experiences (“hosts”) to the table, capturing tailwinds from the passion and creator economy. Secondly, they build a platform with features like game cards and on-screen tools that enables teams and hosts to take experiences beyond the limited functionality of meeting platforms like zoom whose monotony causes fatigue and disengagement. Culture is not defined by a meeting, but by human connections and Unlock enables deeper team experiences purpose-built for connection and fun"
Judith Dada
General Partner, La Famiglia
Investors
Judith Dada
La Famiglia
Kima Ventures
Antler
GuideStar Ventures
Eduardo Ronzano
Thibaud Elziere
Frederic Montagnon
Julien Romanetto
Nicolas Steegmann
Philipp Moehring
Andy Chung
Ville Vesterinen
Atomico Angel Network
Richard Faern
Ian Hathaway
Lu Li
Personio
Foodora
Malt