Seattle Common Room startup exits stealth mode with $ 52 million in funding

The news: Seattle-based one-year-old startup Common Room is largely coming out of stealth mode. The company revealed total funding of $ 52 million and reputable clients using its software that aims to help businesses deepen relationships with their users and customers. GeekWire first discovered the startup in September as it was starting to take off.

The product: Company tools serve as an intermediary between organizations and people in their communities. It integrates with communication apps like Slack, Twitter, Discord, etc. The idea is to make the “community” a competitive advantage, by connecting users with each other and soliciting feedback on products.

“Referring another user is the best marketing you can ask for. Promoting a client champion is the best sale you could ask for, ”said Sarah Guo, partner at Greylock, who led the $ 32.3 million Series B.

First customers: Companies such as Notion and Pulumi are testing a pilot version of Common Room. “We have business goals around our community’s level of engagement, and we use Common Room to analyze key engagement metrics to help grow the community,” said Aaron Kao, vice president of marketing at Pulumi, based in Seattle.

The team: Common Room has less than 20 employees and is run by four co-founders:

• CEO Linda Lian, Former Partner at Madrona Venture Group and Senior Product Marketing Manager at Amazon Web Services.
• Chief architect Tom Kleinpeter, most recently a senior engineer at Dropbox, which sold a music streaming startup to the cloud giant in 2012.
• Design Chief Francis Luu, a designer who spent 10 years at Facebook.
• CTO Viraj Mody, former director of engineering at Dropbox and technical advisor to the CEO of Seattle-based startup Convoy.

Investors: Index Ventures; Madrona Venture Group; Next Play Ventures; Greylock; 01 advisers; and a host of angel investors – including Josh Silverman, CEO of Etsy; former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo; and former Axiom CEO Elena Donio – are among the backers of the company.

S. “Soma” Somasegar, general manager of Madrona who previously worked with Lian, said it was “obvious” to invest in the common room. He cited his experience working with the developer community while leading the developer division at Microsoft.

“As someone responsible for overseeing what we’ve been doing at Microsoft with the developer community, I had a deep appreciation for what our customer community can do for our platform and, by extension, all that is. built on the Microsoft platform, ”Somasegar wrote in a blog post.

BHAG: What is the company’s Big Hairy Audacious Goal? Lian’s post on LinkedIn sheds some light:

“People often ask me ‘who is the common room for? We are certainly for today’s community teams – the often unsung heroes who care as much about the ‘how’ as the ‘what’, and are typically the first living and breathing human that a practitioner engages with. ‘company. Today, for these community teams, our beta product provides an immediate and organized window into the who, what, where, why and how of their communities – across Slack, Discord, GitHub, events, private messaging channels, social channels and more. We are illuminating what was once a blind spot and also giving community leaders improved workflows to be proactive instead of reactive in nurturing their unique and special communities.

Over time, we will also be for product teams, support teams, marketing teams, and customer teams who wish to extend their hand across the organizational boundaries of their business to engage with the people who use their products day after day and day.