Fond is a young company that already has some cool milestones, and today, I’m excited and humbled to announce one more: Fond has closed $8.5 million in ‘Series A’ financing.
DCM is leading this round, with participation from existing investor, Digital Garage. Osuke Honda from DCM will join the Fond Board, and we know he will bring us great perspective.
When we finalized our seed round six months ago, we said we wanted to help companies of all sizes understand that employee happiness plays a crucial role in increased productivity, engagement, and retention. It’s not some flimsy ideal, or a cost center, or even a luxury that most businesses can’t afford.
The market is starting to agree, by funding new studies and even new ventures.
Thanks to the awesome people who are building this company, we grew 206% in those six months: tripling the size of our team, expanding our customer base, and constantly trying to hone how we help companies delight their employees, simply and affordably.
This round hopefully puts Fond at the forefront of the growing employee happiness market as more and more companies recognize how easy we make it to bring delight to our employees’ everyday professional lives. We hope that this round serves evidence that we’re on the right track — but it doesn’t mean our work is done.
In fact, we’re just getting started. We are already working on some cool ideas, and this investment will help us refine Fond’s strategy, help us scale, and allow us to be better than yesterday for our customers and each other.
What does this mean going forward?
- In the coming months, you’ll see us work on making our core perk offering even more accessible, useful, and easy to manage, as we make perks even easier to take advantage of when employees are out and about. We are taking our time to get this one right: we want to be helpful, but not intrusive.
- We will also be expanding into new markets and negotiating new local and national perks on behalf of our customers, who have sent us requests and feedback.
- We have been working on a new way to recognize a job well done or say thank you, bringing in the surprise and delight of unexpected gifts, that will be key to promoting happiness among teams and to the business as a whole. (That’s in beta right now. Stay tuned!)
- Otherwise, we plan on hiring more excellent teammates across the board and investing our time and resources to understand what employee happiness means to companies around the country, of any size and industry.
We are excited to put these investments to great use. One of our first lessons, which we took to heart back in 2012 and has guided us since: funding is important, but it can’t carry an idea to fruition or drive creativity or inspiration on its own.
Fond’s co-founder Sunny Tsang and I started Fond without a lot of money, competing only with the vision and the standards of the company we were trying to create. We’ve tried to build an amazing team that can execute on the trust and investments given to us by our customers, our investors, employees, partners and all the people who support us every day in ways big and small. It all counts. We know that making it easier for companies to show their employees that they are valued in ways big and small counts, too. We have lots that we can do, and we’re excited to get to it as we start towards our next milestone.
BOOM!
By Taro Fukuyama, CEO of Fond
