START-UPS

7 start-ups that have developed remote working solutions

21 May 2020

A man in a navy jumper using a laptop in front of a large window.

Image: © Marvent/Stock.adobe.com

We rounded up seven start-ups that have created solutions aimed at remote workers and distributed workforces.

Early on in the exodus from offices around the world, we looked at some of the popular tools that may be useful for remote workers, including many well-known platforms such as Zoom, Slack and Trello.

Now that people have likely gotten to grips with some of those tools, or chosen their favourites, we’ve decided to look at some of the other players in the remote working tech scene.

Here, we have gathered seven start-ups that are offering solutions for remote recruitment, workplace collaboration, virtual training and keeping a distributed workforce engaged.

Abodoo

Abodoo was founded by Wexford-based Vanessa Tierney and Ben Wainwright in 2017. The idea behind the business was that new technologies and more flexible conditions would make remote work a reality for more people. Little did they know what would happen three years later.

Previously featured in our Start-up of the Week series, Abodoo is a platform lets those seeking remote or flexible work create a free skills profile that matches them to available opportunities and industries that are recruiting. Hiring employers can post new roles and connect with potential candidates who meet the skills criteria.

Abodoo has more than 25,000 remote and flexible-working members from 62 countries on its platform. It is currently looking to raise €6m in funding.

Bluescape

Founded in 2012, Bluescape is a Silicon Valley-based SaaS company that has created a visual collaboration platform. Launched by Haworth and Obscura Digital, the platform enables individuals and teams to create, interact and share content.

It allows users to keep track of everything that has happened on a project, including meetings, comments, decisions made and iterations, with cross-device functionality for mobile, tablet and desktop devices.

Bluescape can be integrated with a variety of other platforms, including Adobe Creative Cloud, Dropbox, Google Drive, YouTube, OneDrive and Intel Unite.

Brandlive

Based in Portland, Oregon, Brandlive is a SaaS start-up that was founded in 2010 by Fritz Brumder and Ben McKinley. It offers a live video platform that brands and retailers can use to interact with their audience and employees for training, marketing and commerce purposes.

The platform’s training solution allows users to adapt content based on live questions and feedback from the audience, with the goal of improving learning outcomes and cutting travel costs associated with training.

Brandlive also lets businesses host virtual events and large meetings with live video, and counts Adidas, GoPro and The North Face among its customers. With the virtual event feature, users can broadcast live or recorded video in high definition with no delays or ads to more than 20,000 viewers.

Eloops

Eloops is an employee engagement platform that was founded in Tel Aviv in 2017 by Idan Shem Tov, Naor David Melamed and Sharon Dayag.

The team has created an internal social media platform where employees can share stories, experiences and use polls and surveys to get feedback from co-workers. Through the platform, employers can send targeted emails, SMS messages and push notifications, while tracking the success and impact of sent messages.

The platform also features tools to help train employees remotely, and a collection of virtual team-building activities including challenges and games that remote workers can participate in from home.

Figma

Founded in 2015, Figma is a San Francisco-based business that has created a cloud-based tool for collaborative interface design. The start-up recently raised $50m in Series D funding, valuing the firm at $2bn.

While Figma’s main focus is interface design, the start-up’s customers have found a variety of new uses for the platform in recent years, including visual whiteboarding, diagramming, slide creation, city building and even Minecraft skin creation.

The start-up counts Slack, Twitter, GitHub, Microsoft, Intercom and Dropbox among its customers. After the firm’s latest funding round, the company said that it aims to turn its platform into a collaborative meeting space for visual projects, rather than just the place where visuals are made.

Slab

Slab is a knowledge hub designed for the remote workplace, which aims to help distributed teams keep track of shared learning and documentation. Co-founded by Anvisha Pai, Chengyin Liu, James Hsi and Jason Chen, the start-up counts Asana and Ticketmaster among its 3,000 customers.

The start-up aims to make shared knowledge easier to find, allowing companies to pin crucial content for easy reference and sort posts in an order that is coherent to employees. Users can collaborate, interact and comment on the documents in real time, or use the platform’s search engine that can search across all integrations.

The company said that Slab can be used by used by engineering teams, operations teams and sales teams, among others. It can be integrated with Figma, Google Drive, Slack, Wrike, YouTube, Zendesk and Jira.

Tandem

Tandem has created a ‘virtual office’ for remote teams that tries to replicate the flow of working together in person by letting employees see, talk to and collaborate with one another easily. The start-up graduated from last year’s summer Y Combinator programme, attracting interest from several top venture capital firms.

The company’s tech has been used by the likes of Medium, Lyft, Spotify, Airbnb and Dropbox. Some of the platform’s features include shared cursors for screen-sharing collaboration, as well as a social feature that encourages spontaneous conversations with co-workers.

Tandem also offers a video conferencing platform that can be used for one-on-ones or daily stand-ups for the whole team. The concept for the platform was inspired by, and designed using, Figma. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the start-up is offering the platform for free for the next few months.

Want stories like this and more direct to your inbox? Sign up for Tech Trends, Silicon Republic’s weekly digest of need-to-know tech news.

Kelly Earley was a journalist with Silicon Republic

editorial@siliconrepublic.com