Lisbon Challenge Alumni, Impraise, raises 1.6 million
Impraise, the Lisbon Challenge alumni, who is also backed by Y Combinator, has raised 1.6 million dollars to abolish the annual performance review within companies, and replace it with their web and mobile app for timely and actionable feedback between co-workers.
During the last few years, the annual performance review has seen its decline within companies like Deloitte, Adobe or Accenture. According to CEB, faulty performance review processes can cost a company of 10,000 people up to $35 million in lost productivity while 95% of managers are unhappy with the way performance reviews are conducted.
So, to end this lack of productivity, Impraise has built an app that will allow companies to be more efficient when it comes to understanding their employees and take action according to the feedback given between co-workers.
This seed round of 1.6 million dollars includes investors such as Zenefit’s early investor, Palm Drive Ventures, China Growth Capital and HenQ. Coen Van Duiven, CEO of HenQ said: “We strongly believe in the vision that direct and peer-to-peer feedback will be the backbone of a platform which will create continuous improvement, progress and learning for people and organizations”.
This promising startup is already working with some big companies like Booking.com, Atlassian and M&C Saatchi, and they plan to go even further with this investment round.
According to Bas Kohnke, Impraise’s CEO, they’re “building Impraise to help every single professional grow and learn continuously with the incredible power of peer coaching”.
So, instead of exchanging feedback only once or twice a year, Impraise is designed to fit into people’s workflow, making it easy to exchange feedback after meetings or projects, or frequently on a monthly basis.
Since the company’s launch in late 2014 there have been over 300,000 feedback interactions on the platform. And, up until now, the companies that are using Impraise admit that save around 75% of the time that they would usually spend on the annual review. Not to mention that, with this web and mobile app, companies get much more analytics and are able to increase employee engagement.
With this seed round, Impraise will grow their team and further improve the product experience.