Finnish employee engagement startup Teamspective has raised €900,000 in pre-seed funding. The funding round was led by angel investors, including Sammeli Sammalkorpi, CEO and Co-founder of Sievo, who also has firsthand experience with the solution as a customer. The round also includes non-equity funding from Business Finland. Teamspective will use the funding to invest in the development of their breakthrough network- and relationship-aware engagement solution, as well as building their commercial team in Finland and the US.

Engaged people are most valuable to companies, and engagement solutions are widely adopted. While traditional employee engagement survey solutions capture employee sentiment and feedback, they completely ignore the collaboration structures that define how people actually work together in the organization. Social networks and, more specifically, Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) studies these connections.

“Organizations are insanely complex social structures, and it requires superhuman awareness to fully understand the collaboration relationships between people across the whole organization. People are visual creatures, so once our customers see the big picture – their organization network graph – they know what and where the right issues are. Our goal is to help companies notice risks and mitigate them before they turn into actual problems,” explains Teamspective Co-founder & CEO Jaakko Kaikuluoma.

Teamspective believes the innovation of combining engagement and ONA solutions enables companies to better address gaps in cross-functional work, fix siloed teams, reduce burnout risks, and resolve coordination bottlenecks. These have a positive impact on employee well-being and performance.

In the past few years, a lot of work has become digital, partly driven by the increasing amount of remote work. Teamspective measures digital interactions between people using data from solutions like Slack, Jira, and Google Calendar. This creates real-time visibility and understanding of how an organization actually operates.

The investors see numerous possibilities in employee engagement solutions as companies are more and more aware that high employee engagement leads to better results and talent retention. With the growing demand for software solutions that measure and develop workplace culture, the sector’s market value is predicted to reach USD 4.4 Billion by 2033.

“Sievo is a procurement analytics company, so, of course, we love analytics. We want the best tools for people analytics, too. Teamspective gives us a sense of clarity on the issues that are most relevant to our people and organization right now, and it guides us in discussing them. Their unique approach in combining network analysis with engagement pulse surveys made me want to become an investor when given the chance. They have an outstanding team that keeps on delivering,” says one of the investors, Sammeli Sammalkorpi, CEO and Co-founder of Sievo.

Being able to perform organizational analyses is especially important for fast-growing tech companies, as they have the highest pace of change in any industry.

“Employee engagement and wellbeing are essential to our strategy and culture at Metacore. After our game Merge Mansion became a hit, we’ve been growing faster than ever and needed a better, more automated tool to ensure we maintain a continuous dialogue about employee experience. We see listening to our employees as a growth enabler, and Teamspective is a powerful tool for that. We chose Teamspective, because they’re a modern engagement solution with a great Slack user experience. Additionally, they have an exceptionally ambitious product roadmap where also our input as a key customer is concretely noted,” says Maria Törnroos, Wellbeing & Performance lead at Metacore.

Teamspective’s solution is currently used by customers in a diverse range of industries, from tech unicorns to industrial organizations and gaming companies to consulting organizations.

“There are challenges in every company – the defining thing for success is how quickly you identify them and implement changes,” Kaikuluoma concludes.