Qatalog raises $15M to build the future of work

Qatalog announced today it had raised a $15M Series A investment to expand its London team and bring to market a new infrastructure for work, to give employees better visibility of work, access to information and ability to collaborate in the face of the overwhelming proliferation of SaaS tools in the workplace.

Temps de lecture : 5 minutes

The latest investment round was led by Atomico, with participation from Salesforce Ventures, and angel investors Jacob de Geer (CEO/co-founder of iZettle), Chris Hitchen (Partner at Inventures, founder Getprice), Thijn Lamers (former EVP at Adyen) and all existing investors. As part of this investment, Atomico Partner Irina Haivas will join the board.

This follows a $3.5M seed round raised by the company in October 2019, led by Mosaic Ventures, with participation from Taavet Hinrikus (Transferwise CEO/Co-founder), Paul Forster (Founder, Indeed), Ott Kaukver (former CTO, Twilio), Renaud Visage (Co-founder, Eventbrite), Philipp Moehring and Andy Chung (Tiny Supercomputer), Andreas Klinger (Remote First Capital) and angels from Transferwise, Deepmind and Monzo which the company is also announcing today. This brings the company’s total funding raised to date to $18.5M.

Qatalog brings together all of the SaaS building blocks of modern work, including Teams/Slack, Microsoft/Google Suite, Zoom, Confluence, Jira, Notion, Asana and others. It organizes and contextualizes these tools around the relevant people, teams and projects in a company - or as the company calls it, the ‘Work Graph’. Qatalog unifies information, making it accessible and transparent, and automates routine work. To do the things necessary for people to work smarter and collaborate better, up and down the organisation.

Tariq Rauf, Founder & CEO of Qatalog said: “Teams today need a compass to better navigate the complex and vast knowledge space of a modern company as well as the new modalities of working: remote, async and from various devices. The modern workplace uses a lot of tools, and these tools will continue to further specialise. We don’t think that's a problem we can or should solve, but we can provide the foundations and relevant context for all of these tools to plug into so they don’t end up creating yet another silo. We’re building an intuitive platform that brings all the pieces of our chaotic workspace together. It’s entirely new infrastructure for collaboration and information sharing, rebuilt from the ground up to support how we really work today. Our team is on a mission to make modern knowledge work simpler, better and maybe even fun.”

Irina Haivas, Partner at Atomico, said: “The explosion of software tools has caused confusion in the modern workplace, and that pain point has been exacerbated by a shift towards more remote and hybrid work. This has given birth to a need for something entirely new. A new kind of workplace infrastructure that knits all these different tools together. After all, the real promise of these apps isn’t just in what they do individually—it’s what they can do together. That’s because each of them is great at something, but imagine what they could do if they’d work together as a team. Qatalog is the missing piece in the SaaS workplace puzzle that solves this problem. We have been so impressed by how thoughtful Tariq and the Qatalog team have been in rebuilding team collaboration from the ground up and, in so doing, have created an entirely new category of one.”

Toby Coppel, Co-founder and Partner at Mosaic, said: "When I first met Tariq more than a year ago, I was blown away by his determination to build a team with the very best people possible. He's demonstrated an incredible ability to attract world class talent and the product they are building together will completely transform the way people work, helping to deliver the Work OS of the future."

Qatalog is built on the understanding that all of these SaaS tools are unbeatable at their specific purposes, from collaborating on docs to managing projects. What’s missing is an actual virtual workspace — the one place where you can bring all those blocks, and the precious knowledge that lives in them, together. And where you can control, standardise and coordinate everything, while also making it all searchable and easy to navigate.

Having all those pieces in one place instead of spread across a thousand open tabs and apps means that employees can now:

Find every person, team and live project in the company — and their relevant connections across their tools
Search for information, documents and files across their tools from one place
Reduce email and messaging burden, and improve visibility and coordination via asynchronous & automated updates
Simplify, standardise and monitor routine work processes with workflows
Align the company across projects, teams, and departments with goals

Qatalog envisions that employees should only have to rely on one source for accessing all work related information across the company.

The future

The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the trend towards remote workforces to a global phenomenon (across industries) almost overnight, adding further pressure to issues around data fragmentation and collaboration. Nearly three in four senior executives are planning to make at least some parts of their workforce permanently remote, according to a Gartner survey.

The company will use the new funding to build out its London team. Currently, the team includes world class product, engineering and design specialists from companies such as Amazon, Mozilla, Microsoft, Invision and Transferwise.