Simpplr raises $10 million for its AI-powered intranet platform

Simpplr today raised $10 million for its AI-powered intranet platform that is designed to streamline communications. CEO Dhiraj Sharma says the funds will be used to drive customer adoption during the pandemic as Simpplr develops new products and extends its partner ecosystem.

With people increasingly work from home, businesses have put a renewed focus on intranets to engage with and manage employees remotely. (“Intranet” refers to a company’s internal network for information sharing and collaboration tools.) But intranets have traditionally had an engagement problem. According to a Prescient Digital Media survey, only 13% of workers report using their intranets on a daily basis.

Simpplr claims its AI technologies ensure intranet content is up-to-date, relevant, and compelling by tailoring users’ experiences based on role, location, tenure, department, topical interests, and previous searches. The end-to-end encrypted platform integrates with digital workspaces like Box, Google Drive, Slack, and Microsoft Office 365, allowing employees to choose from native Android and iOS apps or the web to access their company’s portal.

Simpplr features an employee directory with profiles incorporating biographies, areas of expertise, activities, social connections, and other professional tidbits. From a Facebook-inspired feed, employees can engage with other employees by sharing, liking, and responding to content or by following users and participating in polls, quizzes, and surveys. They can also follow and favorite certain coworkers to keep up with internal posts, blogs, photos, calendar events, videos, announcements, and celebrations.

Managers can create social workspaces within Simpplr for teams, departments, and communities, and they can add knowledge bases using preformatted pages that remain fully searchable. Privileged users can view analytics to see which content is performing best in terms of views and engagement and personalize employees’ experiences based on role, location, and domain while allowing them to customize and organize their home page.

Above: Simpplr’s intranet pages.

Image Credit: Simpplr

Simpplr’s auto-governance engine automatically monitors, surfaces, and unpublishes stale content and can audit activities or track content that’s in high demand. It also alerts authors to act when content needs a refresh and facilitates review, validation, and archival processes, pulling the latest content from other systems while offering analytics on why certain content isn’t being read.

Admins can publish email digests and newsletters using Simpplr or mark an article a “mandatory read.”  Elsewhere, Simpplr offers a search tool that provides quick access to people, files, sites, and more; a brand editor that customizes colors, fonts, and logos; and an access control tool that manages roles and user permissions to define what actions managers and employees can take.

Despite competition from the likes of Workvivo and Happeo, Simpplr claims that 250,000 people across 200 organizations — including AAA, Fox, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, DocuSign, the World Economic Forum, and Columbia University — use its platform. (The company’s annual recurring revenue grew 130% last year.) At Workday, Simpplr’s recommendation algorithms decreased support requests by 52%. And at Eurostar and Future State, they ostensibly boosted employee engagement and decreased employee onboarding communication by 253% and 25%, respectively.

The series B round announced today was led by Norwest Venture Partners, with participation from Salesforce Ventures, and brings Simpplr’s total raised to nearly $30 million. The six-year-old company is headquartered in Redwood City, California, with an office in Gurgaon, India.