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Multitudes, a SaaS product that helps teams improve culture and performance, has raised $2.4M NZD from investors including Ellen Pao, Blackbird Ventures, and Jon Williams (co-founder of Culture Amp and Pyn) to build their beta product. Using data that companies already have, Multitudes provide insights and coaching so managers can create happier, better-performing teams. The New Zealand-based company launched an alpha product with customers earlier this year and has since seen early wins, with team leads identifying blind spots, shifting behaviour, and improving team performance.
The founder of Multitudes, Lauren Peate, has seen first-hand how team culture impacts performance; the product was born from her frustration at seeing how easy it is for leaders to miss issues in their teams. Lauren has worked at the intersection of culture and performance throughout her career, from consulting for Fortune 500 tech companies while at Bain & Co. in San Francisco, to working with young startups in the Middle East as COO and advisor, and finally to founding Ally Skills NZ, a diversity, equity, and inclusion consultancy. “Managers have a lot on their plates; between that and the systemic biases we all have, everyone has blind spots. Our goal with Multitudes is to show how the human side of work is impacting team performance. We show managers their blind spots with their teams and support them to improve each team’s performance. We’re all better off when we unlock the full potential of our teams.”
One of their first customers is Mathew Hartley, CTO of an EdTech company called Storypark. He shared that “The data from Multitudes has helped us raise the right questions within our team and see the bigger picture. We’re now able to back our hunches with data to present to our senior leadership team and quickly relieve any bottlenecks.” Using Multitudes, Storypark identified that support for their senior developers was a key area to focus on. Within a month, they had increased the amount of peer feedback to senior developers, and within two months, they decreased their cycle time by 30% – meaning that the work got done faster.
Another early customer, Dan Barrow, a team lead at Conqa, a Construction Tech company, said that “Multitudes has provided great insight into the health of the team – things that I never would have guessed otherwise.” Dan used Multitudes’s data to identify opportunities to improve the quality of their code reviews; as one example, 2 months later their team members were asking 60% more questions.
In what was an oversubscribed round, the Multitudes team was delighted to bring in experienced, values-aligned investors from the USA, Australia, and New Zealand. Lauren said, “Our investors recognise the link between culture and performance, and they bring relevant experience in HRTech, AI/ML technologies, scaling global B2B/enterprise businesses through to acquisition, and ensuring inclusive and equitable workplaces.” Tip Piumsomboon, Principal at Blackbird Ventures, says the firm was attracted to the company’s purpose and leadership. “We love Multitude’s mission of empowering new generations of managers to improve feedback culture and transparency, using the data they already have. Lauren is a rare breed of founder, with strong instincts and a deep understanding of her customers while executing on product at a lightning speed. Her passion hits you in the face and she’s an incredible magnet for talent and an evangelist for her cause.”
Lauren also notes that New Zealand was the perfect place to launch this company into the world. “With New Zealand getting COVID under control so quickly, we’ve been able to hire from a highly-skilled pool of Kiwis returning from around the world. What’s more, we’ve been able to meet in person as needed for user testing or team strategy days.” As an American who only moved to New Zealand five years ago, Lauren was especially impressed by the strong support she’s gotten from the local tech ecosystem; “there’s a strong, closely-connected tech community here, and everyone is doing what they can to make sure we all succeed on the world stage.”
Multitudes will use their investment to build their beta product and expand their customer base. This will involve deepening their analysis about the intersections of team behavior and performance and building in more features around goal-setting, tracking, and recommendations for what to try next. If you’re excited about what they’re building, sign up for access to their beta program.
Multitudes provides insights and coaching to unlock happier, higher-performing teams. They integrate with the tools you already use at work – starting with GitHub and Slack – to highlight blind spots and to provide recommendations on how to improve. Their first focus is on software development teams, linking up performance metrics like cycle time and the team’s volume of work with culture metrics like how long people wait for feedback and who supports whom. Sign up for their beta program here.
