The team collaboration app market is booming, and in the wake of Slack’s recent IPO, the market is now valued at $45 billion. San Francisco-based startup Swit announced it has raised more than $6 million in additional funding to aid its already rapid growth within the app space.
Today, 83% of professionals depend on technology to collaborate, but despite companies like Slack’s success, there is yet to be one singular collaboration app that suits all the needs of an organization. According to a report from M.io, 91% of businesses use at least two messaging apps, with many companies listing four to seven collaboration tools that their employees are using.
Founder and CEO of Swit, Josh Lee, commented, “Like so many, we spent significant time on collaboration apps but felt frustrated that we needed to use different apps when dealing with different functions and departments of the company. Every team was using Slack for internal communication but it doesn’t really provide task management, so in addition Marketing was using Asana, IT was using Jira, Sales was using Monday.com. Why wasn’t there one team collaboration app that worked for everyone? With Swit, we wanted to create the new standard for team collaboration apps and make one that could be used across the company – eliminating the need for multiple applications. Within 4 months of releasing Swit, ahead of any marketing, we already have over 450 companies using it, and one of the fastest adoption rates in business SaaS.”
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Prior to incorporating in the United States and moving its headquarters to the San Francisco Bay Area, Swit was founded in Seoul, South Korea by Josh Lee and Max Lim, the former co-founder of auction.co.kr, which was acquired by eBay. The more than $6 million seed round of funding was led by Korea’s largest venture capital firm, Korea Investment Partners, with participation from Hyundai Venture Investment Corporation and Mirae Asset Venture Investment. This round includes nearly $1 million in seed funding received in November 2018 from Kakao Ventures, bringing the total current seed investment in the company to just over $7 million.
Swit CTO Max Lim notes, “We were able to utilize a ‘last mover advantage.’ We knew well the functionality and features each department of a company needed and put them into one centralized system. Messaging apps are great but getting bombarded with notifications all day from group chats that have nothing to do with you is not so fun. We integrated chat with advanced settings to determine what kinds of messages you want to be alerted to, and which shouldn’t interrupt your workflow.
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“In addition we have integrated Kanban task management, calendar, Gantt charts, and much more. We also put a big emphasis on the UI to create something that is easy to use for anyone across a company, and available on desktop and mobile. We are already proud of what we’ve built but have a lot of exciting announcements in the pipeline. This funding will help accelerate their time to market.”
Early Swit adopter Sourabh Ahuja, the CPO of GSVlabs, commented, “As Chief Product Officer, I use a large number of disparate project management and communication tools to manage my team. Everything from Jira to Confluence to Slack to email. Our team was spending a ton of time connecting the dots and switching apps, and Swit has helped immensely cut down on that. Now that everything is in one place it’s easy to find conversations had in messages and relate them directly to project tasks. I’ve also been very impressed with the quality of the UI, it was incredibly easy for us to get set up and learn how to use the program. We have also been recommending Swit to the 350+ startups in our ecosystem.”
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