Portland remote-work startup raises $2.1M to fund further growth
Courtesy / Luke Thomas
Luke Thomas is the founder and CEO of Friday, a Portland startup that has developed a remote work platform.
Friday, a Portland-based developer of a communications platform for remote-work teams, has big plans for $2.1 million in venture capital funding announced Monday.
The latest round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm that's helped more than 120 companies go public including Shopify, Yelp, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Bessemer was joined by other investors including Active Capital, of San Antonio; Underscore.vc, of Boston, which led a $450,000 fundraising round for Friday earlier this year; El Cap Holdings; TLC Collective; and New York Venture Partners.
Luke Thomas, CEO of Friday, founded the company in 2016 as a side project and then went full-time in September 2019. He previously worked for a tech startup in Nashville and remotely for another company based in Switzerland.
He likens the Friday platform to an orchestra conductor conducting behind the scenes to help remote teams connect and collaborate, easing the work flow with features such as planning calendars and automated productivity reports. Put another way, "the computer does the boring stuff for you," he said.
Thomas told Mainebiz that his firm will use the $2.1 million for hiring, product development, sales and marketing and general costs.
Friday's growth comes just as remote work is taking off during the pandemic, as detailed in Upwork's "2020 Future Workforce Report" published in June. Its survey of more than 1,500 U.S. hiring managers found that 94% report their organizations use remote workers, and that 62% believe their workforces will be more remote than pre-pandemic estimates.
Thomas told Mainebiz that while he had been thinking about remote work for years, "we were in the right space at the right time."
He sees Friday's current biggest competitor as "the way things have always been," but fully expects other rivals to enter the fast-growing niche in which Friday "has quite a bit of a head start."
Thomas said Friday has customers in Maine and all over the world "in the thousands" who have tried the platform, and that its "sweet spot" is firms with 250 or fewer employees.
Among its plans for the capital boost, Friday is looking to add to its team of four part-time employees and a few contractors. “The goal is to double that by this time next year,” Thomas said. “We're actively hiring.”
He also noted that while Friday is a company whose employees who can work from anywhere, it aims to hire locally whenever it can though that can pose a challenge.
"It's difficult to find tech talent for any company," he said, "so you have to expand your scope a little bit."
The $2.1 million seed funding round comes less than a year after the earlier financing led by Underscore.vc. Thomas told Mainebiz he connected with Bessemer Ventures in the spring, and describes what Friday does as a work orchestration platform.
"It's like a digital planner for work," he explains. "If you're an individual and you use Friday, you can instantly roadmap your work day, and it helps you spend more time being productive. It helps you spend more time being productive, and you can kick-start routines to automate status updates."
He said Friday's users mainly work for technology or service-based businesses and those "where a decent amount of coordination is a large part of the workplace."
Asked about his long-term plans for the business, Thomas said, "As a venture-funded company, you either go public, out of business or get bought by someone else. I would prefer not to go out of business."
What investors say
Friday's venture capital backers are excited about the company and its growth plans.
"Many remote teams are struggling with the visibility problem of knowing what everyone is working on," said Pat Mathews, CEO of Active Capital, in Monday's news release. "We believe Friday is best positioned to solve this problem with their focus on automating routine updates that help form strong habits.”
Kunal Tandon, co-founder and managing partner of El Cap Holdings, said "Friday is solving a critical pain point for teams that are rushing to adapt to this new way of working."
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