Vancouver’s Weave VC backs employee experience startup Wavy
The culture management platform plans to ‘dive deeper into people analytics and smart recommendations.’
Wavy — a culture management platform — has received new growth funding from Weave VC, with participation from previous investors Laconia Capital, Two Small Fish, and Backbone Angels. That money will help the startup to expand its offerings and support more customers.
Wavy was founded in 2020 by CEO Shawn Hewat and CTO Neshay Ahmed, who previously worked together at employee communication startup Nudge, before it was acquired by learning management system Axonify. The two felt that the old way of approaching company culture was stale and that they could bring something fresh, inclusive, and accessible. They also wanted to provide solutions for companies with distributed teams, which they believe businesses will continue to embrace. To date, Wavy has worked with the likes of Bench Accounting, 7shifts, Scribd, League, Shopify, TELUS, and more.
“If you really think about work, it has become headquartered online,” Hewat told the Vancouver Tech Journal. “So we're in a new era of challenges that leaders have to figure out, which is ‘How do we create meaningful connections in this environment?’ One, people [need to] feel highly connected to each other. They can trust their colleagues and know them better than a face and a name on Slack. Two, they [must] feel connected to the work they're doing every day. And three, they [should] feel this wider connection to the mission, vision, values of the company.”
She added: “I think a lot of people [struggle] with how to make that happen. It can't just be in one format, like everyone getting together in the office. You have people all over the place. So what's the multi-pronged approach to engage employees, knowing that you can't get everyone in one room? That's the biggest challenge that [companies] are facing.”
Core components
Wavy offers a centralized tool for planning, managing, and measuring culture programming for a variety of events, like town halls, AMAs with leadership, trainings, lunch and learns, off-sites, and socials. It can also be integrated with over 30 human resource activity systems, including Slack, Google, and Microsoft.
“When you run events through our platform, all of the busywork is automated and your communications, reminders, and feedback will run seamlessly,” the CEO said. “This is helping teams be much more productive and save time, but most importantly, it's giving them reliable data and visibility into employee connection and health [...] They can leverage insights from Wavy to get much more proactive or thoughtful with their culture calendar.”
The platform also offers a marketplace with hundreds of curated experiences for teams to participate in. It initially focused on team building, but has grown to include well-being; diversity, equity, and inclusion training and workshops; leadership development; and upskilling. There’s also an option for employers to gift experiences to employees.
“Wavy’s kind of becoming that one-stop shop,” said Hewat. “What our customers love is that it's all vetted and pre-tested. They can see reviews from other companies, so they can have that trust that they don't have to go out and do all the research and that their team will love it.”
Features and opportunities
As for what’s next, Wavy anticipates that its platform will continue to be used by not only HR teams, but also people managers, team leads, and employee research group leaders.
“So some of the things we're going to be building as a result of this new round of funding is diving deeper into people analytics, and smart recommendations on culture actions that leaders should take to continue to boost connection and engagement,” said Hewat.
She added: “We're also diving deeper into things like budget management to track and optimize the spend around things like team building, training, and well-being. Another area we're expanding into is working with more enterprise mid-market level teams and making sure our platform can be used not just by hundreds of employees but thousands.”
According to Weave VC, Wavy’s initial focus on companies looking for support with team building represents a $5.5 billion opportunity in North America alone. The firm predicts that the company’s plans are poised to make a bigger impact in the $300 billion global employee experience space.
“With Shawn and Neshay, there’s that great combo of founder-product-market fit, which is what we saw very early on when we got to know them,” said Mark Mitchell, general partner at Weave VC, on why Wavy stood out to the Vancouver-based firm. “I think they’re background as well at Nudge [...] They’re very familiar with the problems in the HR tech and distributed teams environment and they’re the perfect founders to build this product [...] And then the traction that they’ve had on the subscription side of the business with enterprises has been really impressive to see.”
Mitchell added: “Enterprises are getting so much more intentional around how they bring their teams together and the tools that they’re willing to pay for to ensure strong corporate culture. Being able to measure and monitor things within culture is of paramount importance to businesses in 2024. Wavy is really in the sweet spot and positioned well within this fast-growing category, which I think over time is only going to become more important.”
Benefits of building in Vancouver
Like the customers it serves, Wavy has a distributed team in Canada, including in Vancouver — which has been especially valuable for Hewat.
“Something that makes Vancouver tech really strong is its diverse group of founders — not just in the backgrounds that we represent, but the types of companies we're building,” shared Hewat. “In my group of women CEOs that I connect with, we've got healthtech, consulting services, fintech, e-stroller hardware [...] We're all coming from different backgrounds and building in such different categories. But I think that makes us stronger as a community. It's so great to get inspiration outside of your niche.”
She added: “I think the other thing to note is that it's really exciting to see new funds come together in Western Canada like Weave VC [...] Mark, Jeffrey, and Marco are ambitious and they're backing some pretty great companies, so I'm excited to be part of their portfolio.”