Friday raises $2.1M in round led by Bessemer Venture Partners

Friday, the Portland-based startup building software for remote teams, announced today it has raised $2.1 million in an equity round led by Bessemer Venture Partners, one of the oldest and most-well known venture capital funds in the country.

The company, which Founder and CEO Luke Thomas started as a side project in 2016, has been focused for years on building software to help improve the communication habits for remote teams. It raised a smaller pre-seed round of $450,000 early this year and launched a beta product on the expectation that remote work would only grow in popularity. Then the pandemic reached U.S. shores, a sea change that has accelerated companies’ adoption of allowing their employees to work outside an office. A recent Gallup poll estimates that 33% of employees are still “always” working remotely.

Friday claims it currently has “thousands of teams” at companies like Twitter, LinkedIn, Quizlet, Red Hat, EA, 10up, and others using its software platform.

“I’ve tried managing a distributed team via Slack, PM tools, email, and Hangouts before and it’s unmanageable,” Steven Moseley, CTO of Unstack and an early beta user of Friday’s software, said in a statement. “Friday’s toolset is exactly what I was missing that enabled people in different time zones to work together seamlessly.”

Bessemer Venture Partners, an early-stage investment fund founded in 1911 with more than $5 billion in assets under management, led Friday’s newest round. Other VC firms that also invested include San Antonio-based Active Capital, Boston-based Underscore VC, Los Angeles-based El Cap Holdings, TLC Collective, and New York Venture Partners. While Thomas was able to attract most of the funds from out-of-state investors, he confirmed that 1% of the round—or around $20,000—was invested by a single Maine angel investor who wishes to remain anonymous.

Friday plans to use the funds to ramp up product development and its go-to-market plans, Thomas told Maine Startups Insider. The company currently has four full-time employees along with a few contractors based in Maine and elsewhere. He plans to ramp up hiring in the next six to eight months, hiring for engineering and non-technical roles like content development, customer support, and sales.

Luke Thomas, Friday’s founder and CEO.

Thomas, a Maine native who grew up in Orrington, founded Friday not long after moving in 2015 back to Maine from Boston. Both he and his wife were able to bring their jobs with them to Maine and became remote workers. He started Friday—originally called Friday Feedback—to build the tools he wish he had access to as a member of a remote team. (Full disclosure: Friday Feedback was the first paid sponsor of Maine Startups Insider’s newsletter back in 2016.)

Friday’s current product has evolved from Thomas’ original vision for Friday Feedback, which was more narrowly defined on helping managers solicit weekly check-ins from team members. He won the Startup South Portland pitch event in 2017 with his idea and gained some early traction, reporting a $60,000 run rate back in 2017. But he pivoted in 2019 from an employee-engagement tool to a communication tool built for distributed teams.

One of the most important factors in the success of remote teams is the ability for colleagues to communicate asynchronously—that is, communication that doesn’t need to happen in real-time, according to Thomas. Providing software that helps develop communication habits and automate routine status updates is what Friday is doing now.

“At Friday, we’ve built a way to capture the structure and connectedness of the office in a way that respects the #1 benefit of remote work, which is a more flexible work environment,” Thomas said. “Unlike workplace chat software and video conferencing apps, Friday does not require constant presence to stay in rhythm and move work forward.”

Thomas calls Friday an “orchestration layer” that sits on top of tools remote workers already use like Slack, Google Docs, Github, Asana, Trello, etc.

“It cuts down on the noise and gives you more time to work on the right things,” he said.

Investors are increasingly realizing that the future of work is remote and that there’s promise in software geared specifically for companies navigating this new reality that want to help equip their remote teams with the best tools for the job.

“After years working with distributed and remote-first companies like Zapier, we’ve seen how high-performance teams leverage asynchronous communication to increase productivity, collaboration, and alignment,” Talia Goldberg, a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, said in a statement. “Friday has built a slick and modern platform to roll out the best practices that would otherwise take years of trial and error to implement.”

John Pearce, co-founder and a partner at Underscore VC, which led Friday’s earlier pre-pandemic, pre-seed round, is more bullish than ever on the company.

“Make no mistake, the need for Friday’s asynchronous remote work platform pre-dates the pandemic,” he said. “And while we’ve seen a forced acceleration of technology to ensure business continuity, the hunger for creating team synchronicity has been a constant factor driving Friday’s growth. It’s also what’s been driving our excitement for the company’s future since 2019.”