As reported on TechCrunch.
by Romain Dillet
French startup Wisembly just raised $2 million (€1.5 million) from Alven Capital. It’s the company’s first round of funding after three years of existence. Wisembly wants to be the only tool you ever need to keep track and streamline your meetings in your company.
“Wisembly is a collaborative solution for corporate meetings,” co-founder Romain David told me in a phone interview. “It allows you to prepare, facilitate and monitor your meetings.”
In other words, Wisembly is an all-in-one platform to assist you when you are leading a meeting — it costs between $13.50 and $27 (€10 and €20) per user per month. To prepare your meeting, you can upload documents, create a poll and more. Then, your meeting attendees receive a link and can interact.
When the meeting actually takes place, the idea is to involve as many people as possible in as little time as possible. It’s physically impossible to ask everyone what they think. That’s why everyone can interact in all sorts of way: you can comment, like, vote, or write down a quote from the meeting. It works well for both in-person meetings and conference calls. Here’s what it looks like:
Finally, when the meeting is over, you can keep track of past meetings. You get an overview of what happened over time, you can come back and see what the most important part of the meeting was based on likes or comments. You can also see if it was an effective meeting based on various metrics.
Meetings are an important pain point in big companies — they drag on, and only a few can speak up. Wisembly wants to fix that, and it works. BNP Paribas, Accenture, SNCF, Danone and around 400 other companies already use the platform. In 2013 alone, Wisembly generated $2 million in revenue (€1.5 million).
“When we first started in 2010, we worked on something very different called Balloon,” David said. “Our prototype allowed you to interact and send content around locations — it worked really well for a conference at Sciences Po for example. But very early, we opted for a bigger vision of the product and the company, and chose to target all sorts of meetings.”
For now, the company focuses on meetings of 20 persons or more. But the idea is to keep lowering the bar to enter the market of small businesses — it’s a more fragmented but bigger market overall. With today’s funding round, the company will hire a dozen of people to accelerate customer acquisition.
“In five years, we want to be like WebEx, but for meetings,” David said. “When you start a conference call, you launch WebEx because everybody knows WebEx. And soon, when you start a meeting, you will open Wisembly.”
