- We close a 5 million € Series A financing with awork 💰
- The awork team grows to more than 40 amazing people 💜
- In 2023, we’ll take awork to the next quality level ✨
Knowledge work has never changed as quickly as it does today. The macroeconomic climate is in flux, but one thing is certain: we will work differently in the coming years than we do today. More distributed, more collaborative, and with further blurring of boundaries between private and professional organization.
That's a good thing, too, because still much of how we work is based on the last millennium’s best-practice - but the world has moved on. We need more innovative teams and work environments that bring joy to their teams.
That's exactly what awork stands for. As a tool for better, more modern teamwork and as an inspiration for how collaborative work can succeed over the next few years.
When we founded awork in 2019, we started with the firm belief that more and more teams will recognize this shift towards new work and seek methods and tools that not only enable it, but drive it. Today, over 2,200 companies with more than 17,000 active users are working better together thanks to awork, and we're ready to take the next step.
Our new partners in crime
We are very pleased to have two new partners on board who will support us in our mission: With Hi Inov-Dentressangle from France and Swiss Post Ventures from Switzerland, we have gained two European partners who, like us, believe in the potential of better work. Together with us, they are investing €5 million into the next phase of awork.
We will use this growth booster to perfect awork as a product, complete our team and reach our milestone goal of helping 10,000 teams in Europe work better and happier together with awork.
On the one hand, our new partners in Crime bring expertise and experience in the B2B SaaS environment, while at the same time being internationalisation experts from German-speaking countries.
The awork team
We have used the last year to put together a wonderful team. Experts from design to engineering who also embody exactly what we hope to achieve with our new way of working:
- Enthusiasm for our team and our mission
- Excitement about the work we do and how to make it even better
- Determination and ambition to achieve our goals
Since this year, we also have a new office in the heart of Hamburg, because hybrid working also includes a shared home. Our headquarters is a place to put our heads together, focus and celebrate together. We’ll create a small production studio for training and webinars with our clients and we have space for big all hands rounds and workshops as a team. It's the place where our team culture can take a very tangible form.
For all these developments in the team, our 9 values remain our guardrails. For a team of our age and size, it sometimes sounds a bit trite to talk about a "values-based team culture". But even a few years after we developed them together, they still accurately describe the things we value, and that does make us proud. We want to be an example and inspiration for other teams who also want to find more happiness in their work.
This year, we will grow to over 40 aworkies and continue to do everything we can to preserve our special team culture - also and especially because we continue to work as a hybrid team. Team members from Rome to Rio belong to awork and that's exactly how it should continue: As of now, we are looking for new teammates in many different roles!
Features, roadmap, awork
The larger funding round is good news for our product. Thanks to the growing product and engineering team, we will be able to further improve the quality of the application in all areas and also implement one or two truly revolutionary enhancements. This will lead to our product roadmap over the coming months:
Already in progress are some long-awaited enhancements to our project and task management basics that will keep us busy in Q1. For example, we are implementing the option to manage more complex subtasks, enabling many new use cases for awork users. As always, we're investing a lot of time and resources into making this implementation simple and clear, so that more options don't lead to more confusion. This is exactly why another evolutionary step of our interface is coming up in the first months of 2023. We're taking a close look at everything to eliminate inconsistencies, shorten click paths, and make awork simpler and clearer overall (and prettier, too 😉).
Another area that is used more frequently than average and whose every simplification affects thousands of users a day is our integrated time tracking. We will expand the possible reports and improve the handling of budgets and their achievement - thinking about desktop versions and other easier ways of time tracking is also on our agenda.
Besides improving the most used awork features, we have a few even bigger plans. We are certain that collaborative and more flexible work across organizational boundaries will become increasingly important and frequent in the coming years. The growth of the freelancer and creator economies, more frequently changing service partners and their networks are just a few examples of the underlying trends. The question, then, is what systems and tools (like awork) need to look like to make the organization of collaborative work as frictionless as possible. This is precisely the topic we will be addressing in the second half of the year - so that collaborating with customers, partners, freelancers and service providers becomes as easy as maintaining your own todo list.
In addition to major extensions, several thousand improvements and optimizations have accumulated in our product roadmap over the last few months. Maturing awork as a product is not just about the milestones and big feature launches, but about continuously improving all processes and their user experience. We see this as another essential building block for the coming period.
for the joy of work.
The first growth phase is behind us, it's time to shift up a gear. A top product, a great team and happy customers make up awork and now powerful growth partners are coming on board. We are ready to show what else we have in store for awork to make our users happy at work. If you want to stay up to date, follow us on LinkedIn, exciting times are ahead for awork! 🚀🤩
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