Ireland-based Workvivo thinks enterprises will look away from existing collaboration and communications platforms and toward their new “social intranet” integrating existing solutions across HCM, employee experience, and enterprise collaboration. They’re going to test that hypothesis with a $16 million Series A round.
Positioning themselves as an “Employee Social Network” and “Social Intranet,” Workvivo says in their pitch deck that a “Major opportunity exists for Workvivo to capture this ESN segment, which is now in a unique position to bring the other major segments together in a unified, integrated solution.” We agree that enterprise HCM buyers like platforms. However, we also know that exists to support the flow of work, not disrupt it. That’s the thing with this positioning. All of the platforms in all of the categories Workvivo wants to disrupt offer integrated, social solutions for communication and the sharing of content, and they’re built on open application programming interfaces (APIs). If Slack, Asana, Microsoft Teams, etc. are where the work is getting done, that’s where HR needs to be. Expecting the enterprise to go to a central HR hub might be a little too much to ask. Especially when HR systems, including those that they list as competitors in their pitch deck, all offer interfaces that have a social context.
