Announcing Bettermode's $7.5m Seed Financing
Press mentions
This seed funding announcement was published when Bettermode was known as Tribe. In December 2022, Tribe was rebranded to Bettermode.
Forbes - Why Tribe Believes In The Power Of Customer Communities
BetaKit - Tribe Technologies Announces November Seed Funding as Company Looks to Scale Online Community Platform
Fortune Term Sheet - Tribe, a Toronto-based platform for enterprise businesses, raised $7.5 million in seed funding.
Axios - A Tornto-based startup that helps brands build customized online communities, raised US$7.5 million in seed funding. Bessemer Venture Partners and CRV co-led, and were joined by Inovia Capital.
Venture Capital Journal - Bessemer, CRV lead $7.5m seed-stage financing of Tribe
Business Leader - Tribe Attracts $7.5M From Global Investors to Grow its Community Platform
MrWeb - Seed Funds for Community Platform Tribe
BusinessCloud - UK key market for ‘customer community’ platform Tribe
There is something that Seth Godin had said in his Ted Talk back in 2009 that we really love:
“It turns out that it's tribes — not money, not factories — that can change our world, that can change politics, that can align large numbers of people. Not because you force them to do something against their will, but because they wanted to connect.”
A little over two years ago Mohsen, Soheil, and I started Bettermode to do just that — create a platform that enables people to connect and help each other. This is a bold mission and it is going to be a long journey.Currently, we’re interested in the challenges that businesses face when building a community of loyal fans: “How can businesses create a safe space to foster authentic engagement?
How to democratize the access to modern tools and experiences that popular social networks offer? How can we help brands become more humanized and drive better quality conversations?”We believe that software, when designed and informed by human interaction best practices, will play a key role in creating communities with delightful social experiences.
This is now reinforced by Bettermode's $7.5m seed financing, led by Bessemer Venture Partners and CRV.Here, we want to share how we’re planning to use this capital.
Why we raised
When I look back at the time Bettermode started and see where we’re today, I’m clear that we have significantly improved our understanding of what customers need.We listened to an overwhelming amount of customer feedback, both positive and negative, evaluated our own goals as a company, and made a conscious but challenging decision to rebuild Bettermode from scratch.
The core elements of the new Bettermode are:
Customizability → Businesses are empowered to create online communities based on the unique needs of their audiences, without any coding knowledge.
Extensibility → Bettermode will enable third-party developers to create new functionalities on top of the platform via apps.
Scalability → The performance of one community component (e.g., feed, file upload, analytics) won’t affect the other components. It will allow us to add new features at a faster pace.
Embeddability → It will be easier to embed a section of the community into products and sites. This is a seamless way to offer social experiences right where audiences already exist.
What’s next
The trust and resources invested into Bettermode allow us to grow our team and pursue the mission of building a community platform based on all of the above-mentioned key elements.
Growing Bettermode team
Only one year ago, we were 15 people working on Bettermode in the middle of the pandemic. Today, our Bettermode teamis 45-member strong – and counting! As we continue to work on Bettermode and improve our solutions, we need more help – so come join us!We are already hiring across all departments, including product, engineering, customer success, and marketing. We value people who are passionate about communities apart from their hunger to learn and teach.
After all, one of our values is - “Learn to teach and teach to learn”. We firmly believe that people improve their knowledge when they teach others.All our team members have ownership; they are given the autonomy to have a strategic impact on how we scale and are also given equity in Bettermode.
Also, Bettermode is a remote-first workplace with a diverse team spread across Canada, United States, Germany, Spain, Nigeria, Southeast Asia, and other places.The diversity of our team will enable us to build the most inclusive product and workplace possible. If this sounds like a place you’d love, send over your application – we look forward to chatting with you!
Building Bettermode
Our top priority remains building a high-quality platform that equips businesses to launch and grow communities using best practices without any coding knowledge!With the risk of sounding repetitive, I’m going to draw your attention to the “platform” approach because that’s what makes Bettermode stand out.
Bettermode’s no-code community solution comes packaged with two components, a core platform, and modular apps. The core platform solves the most complex parts of an online community: member management, feed, notifications, moderation, analytics, and security. Apps are installed on top of the core platform to extend functionality such as events, Q&A, ideation, drop-in audio chat, and messaging. Apps can also introduce integration with other products such as Zoom, Zendesk, Salesforce, and Hubspot.
These apps are initially built by Bettermode's internal team. In the future, third-party developers will also be able to build apps and release them via Bettermode's App Store.
A straightforward analogy in the SaaS space is the Shopify App Store.This platform approach will remain our focus and everything we do will be geared towards that. Moreover, we will be introducing new resources to improve customer education and equipping customers with everything they need to be successful.
A note of appreciation
This announcement post will be incomplete without talking about our customers and investors.
Customers
The success that Bettermode is experiencing today would not have been possible without the feedback and trust our customers have placed. Bettermode's customers such as Pipedrive, ConvertKit, ASUS, IBM, and many more have helped us build a compelling community platform.Now, tens of thousands of active communities across the Globe are running on Bettermode to connect close to 10m people. To be honest, we’re blessed to have Pipedrive as one of our customers. The suggestions from the Pipedrive team have been immensely helpful.And according to Mariah Olson, Head of Community at Schoolhouse, Bettermode's customizability has enabled the company to get creative with the design and content structure of the online community.
“The flexibility of the platform is great for designing and structuring the community! I really enjoy the additional apps available on the app store as well as the amazing team behind Bettermode. The team is super responsive and great at thinking along.”— Mariah Olson, Head of Community at Schoolhouse
Bettermode's community now has tens of thousands of members! I welcome you to join the community to get access to best practices on community management and resources to best leverage the Bettermode Platform.
Investors
We have brought some awesome and smart people to Bettermode as investors. Bessemer Venture Partners and CRV are among the leading global investors and we’re honored to be joining their family of companies.We also have the backing of marquee investors such as Inovia Capital, Path Ventures, Garage Capital, Bogaroo, Tribe Capital Partners, Golden Ventures, N49P, and PrimeSet.
Finally, I’d like to thank our prominent angel investors like Des Traynor (Co-founder of Intercom), Martin Basiri (CEO of ApplyBoard), Mohsen Shahini (Co-founder of Top Hat), and Brandon Chu (VP at Shopify) for their help and guidance.What this means for our customers is that our product and services will improve at a faster pace as we grow the Bettermode team.
And as always we are committed to collecting customers’ feedback, stories, challenges, and triumphs!
If you like what we’re doing, consider spreading the word on Twitter. 💚
