The Org Raises $20 Million from Tiger Global to Build the Platform for Work
We raised a $20m Series B led by Tiger Global, and we’re excited to share why we raised and what we’re going to do with it. In this round we also had the continued participation of our Series A investors Sequoia, Founders Fund, and Balderton Capital, as well as new faces joining us, including Thursday Ventures, Lars Fjeldsoe-Nielsen, Neeraj Arora, Gavin Baker, and others.
Our growth since our Series A has been incredible. This summer, nearly two million professionals used The Org and 5,000 new companies joined. We’ve watched early adopters like Dbt Labs, Contentful, and Deel grow from small startups into newly minted unicorns while hiring and organizing their growing teams using our platform. We’ve monetized. With this new capital we plan to shift into the second phase of The Org’s product, grow our team in New York, Copenhagen, and elsewhere, and 10x new users and adoption once again.
What is The Org?
The Org is a network of 130,000 public org charts. We are taking the dusty org chart out of the drawer and turning it into an interactive tool for collaboration, adding a professional profile that reflects who you are, what you do, and who you do it with, and connecting all individuals and teams in one transparent network and real time professional map of work. Our vision is to build the platform for work powered by a global network of public org charts.
Why? Because we believe that organizational design and team culture are fundamental to company success. Increasingly, employees, candidates, and customers believe this too. We are convinced that workplace transparency is inevitable because it has such an outsized advantage for team alignment, hiring, and customer relationships.
Why Now?
In 2021, it’s easy to see that work is changing. The real question is what happens next.
We know that going to the same office every day is over. The 9-5 workday is retiring. Teams are going remote and companies are going distributed-first. The old way of working assumes that people generally hold one role, have one boss, and work in one place. The professional workforce is rejecting these concepts in favor of more dynamic collaboration between colleagues, with teams in multiple time zones, with diverse cultural backgrounds and different communication styles.
Work is barrelling toward a system of distributed and self-organized professionals collaborating with colleagues they choose on the projects they want. Our aging tools for finding job opportunities, aligning teams, and getting to know colleagues were built for a previous reality. We’re building for what’s next.
Specifically, here’s what we believe the future has in store:
Work is now distributed-first. A distributed future relies on self-organization and maximum information about people and process. Enabled by collaborative software, the world’s best teams are no longer bound by geography. To maximize alignment and team productivity, this high-trust future will require much more readily available information about who is doing what and why.
Transparency is the future of work. The remote and fundamentally online character of work combined with the power of social media has given birth to a new standard for organizational transparency. Organizations that build in public attract more customers and better talent. Transparency is now a strategic advantage.
Traditional professional signals are less and less relevant. For employers and job-seekers, the critical facts are not surface level or name-brand dependent, but instead rely on underlying signals of real culture, values and accomplishments. We need a new platform to showcase the substantive details about people and teams - where employees can really know each other and the places they work and where talent and customers can get behind the scenes.
The Org addresses this transparent, collaborative, and distributed future of work. Individuals present themselves in holistic ways via reimagined professional profiles. Teams are more effective because they utilize the public org chart to understand who does what and with who. Organizations openly showcase their actual work, teams, and culture in unvarnished ways to attract new talent and customers.
Almost two decades ago, LinkedIn introduced the concept of the public resume. Shocking at first, it now universally defines how we professionally perceive ourselves and others. We are doing the same with the public org chart.
How We’re Deploying This New Capital
Over our first two years we successfully built a transparent tool for team structure, a directory of hundreds of thousands of teams, and the building blocks of a professional network.
This new capital enables us to unlock the next phase of The Org. We will double the team focusing on product, distribution, and monetization. We will expand our offices and move beyond New York and Copenhagen. We will grow from 30,000 users every day to 300,000. And we will become an indispensable tool that the ten thousand fastest growing startups in the U.S. and internationally use to navigate the hour by hour complexities and relationships of work.
In just a few short years, millions of employees across the world’s top companies will use The Org each day. In ten years, hundreds of millions of professionals across industries will look to The Org to understand who does what and why at any given organization across the globe. The Org will be the source of truth and map for all work. To begin to get us there, the majority of our funding will be invested in building a stellar team in Copenhagen and New York City.
Our Team
Since we raised our Series A in 2020, we’ve established a team of great people excited to take on the challenge of improving how we work online. Some of those people include:
Keyan Sarrafzadeh: Head of Analytics. Formerly an Investment Associate and Head of Business Development at The House Fund. Keyan has previously called Bahrain, Dubai, and San Francisco home.
Chinue Ellis: Scout Associate. Chinue is a Brooklyn native who has traveled to 16 countries. She is a graduate of the New School and career recruiter passionate about a better experience for both startups and great talent.
Thor Olesen: Machine Learning Engineer. Thor is a Brussels native and backend software engineer who spent time at University of Copenhagen and UC Berkeley before joining The Org.
Maria Borch Jessen: Head of People and Culture. Maria is an expert of international business and strategic management having studied both for her Masters at Copenhagen Business School. She was a Tech Consultant for EY and Analyst for Danske bank before joining The Org.
Heini Zachariassen: Advisor. Heini is the Founder of Vivino, a wine community that provides users with the rating, review, and average price of any wine.
Keith Rabois: Board Member. Keith is a general partner at Founders Fund where he has led investments in DoorDash, Affirm, Stripe, Palantir, Airbnb, and more. He previously helped lead companies like PayPal, LinkedIn, and Square.
And that’s not to mention the wider team of 50 (which, yes, you can see in full on our public org chart!) between Copenhagen and New York. We’ve come a long way and have many more milestones ahead of us, and are excited for the next steps and for those who want to join us for them! If you’re interested in learning more, check out our current job openings to see how you can contribute to building the new platform for the new world of work.
Photo credit: Kenneth Ku Laursen
