Company secures $1.2 million pre-seed funding to support further product development and market expansion
Rock, a truly multimodal communication platform that combines both asynchronous and synchronous ways of communicating, today announced a $1.2 million pre-seed round. The round was led by Section 32, a venture capital firm founded by Bill Maris, and with participation from angel investors Manik Gupta (ex-Uber Chief Product Officer), Aadil Mamujee (Head of Product at Automattic/WordPress.com) and Marc Vanlerberghe (ex-Google VP and former CMO of Medallia). The capital will support the company’s global growth ambitions to deliver on its mission – to empower anyone to work from anywhere in times when many companies and individuals make longer-term decisions to shift to a more distributed way of working.
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Rock is an intuitive and easy-to-use productivity platform that enables distributed teams to communicate and collaborate more effectively with each other. It integrates messaging, tasks, notes, and platforms such as Zoom and Google Drive into one tool so teamwork becomes more seamless and productive.
“We recognize that remote work is here to stay, and we support Rock’s long term vision to build a productivity platform that simplifies how we work, is accessible to anyone and increases productivity for every individual, project, or team irrespective of where they are,” said Bill Maris, founder of Section 32 and founder & former CEO of Google Ventures – an early Slack investor.
Rock has created the first truly multimodal communication platform that combines both synchronous and asynchronous ways of communicating to boost productivity for distributed teams. As a result, there is no need to switch between different apps to get work done since all communication and collaboration can happen within Rock. With Rock, cross-organizational work happens more seamlessly as part-timers, freelancers, and other external partners who are now more commonly part of an extended team can have access to the same information as everyone else.
Rock launched in November 2020, and as the workplace undergoes a major transformation due to an ongoing pandemic, it has experienced accelerated growth and demand for its services. Rock is currently being used by thousands of users and hundreds of teams across 26 countries, from the U.S. to India, through the U.K. and Kenya, serving startups, marketing teams, agencies, non-profits, and organizations that work with external partners.
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“The challenges faced by distributed and remote teams today have been significantly accelerated by the ongoing pandemic. People are working longer hours, they have more meetings, and it’s more difficult to disconnect because communication still mostly happens in real-time using platforms, which were never intended to be used by distributed teams,” said Kenzo Fong, CEO and co-founder of Rock.
“We believe that communication should be asynchronous by default, and synchronous when needed, allowing anyone to respond at their own pace while saving video calls and real-time conversations for more complex topics. This is why Rock brings both asynchronous and synchronous ways of communicating together. It removes the pressure to respond right away to instant messages and notifications and to always be online. With Rock, you can organize all your projects, keep things simple and keep your team productive.”
“Everyone has been affected by remote work, and Rock has huge potential in rethinking our daily workflow by offering technology that helps us be more productive. With companies shifting towards a distributed workforce my hope is that productivity tools like Rock will also open up new opportunities for people outside of the traditional Silicon Valley innovation hub,” said Manik Gupta, angel investor and ex-Chief Product Officer at Uber.
“As someone who leads a distributed product development team, I’m a believer in the need for reimagined tools that power distributed work. These tools should be more asynchronous, enable transparency and connect previously siloed workstreams. Rock fits the bill and I’m excited about the product vision shown by the team,” said Aadil Mamujee, angel investor and Head of Product at Automattic/WordPress.com – a fully distributed company.
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