The SEDNA team is excited to let the world know we’ve raised a $10M Series A in service of smarter, faster, and more productive team communication. SEDNA was designed to not just reduce email volume, but to create working environments where efficiency, collaboration, and trust are intrinsic—whether they’re located inside a traditional office or through a network of computers scattered across the globe.
While distanced teams and telework have been on the rise for years, the global pandemic understandably saw a sharp increase. It further highlighted the need for tools and systems that are created for global and remote teams, and that SEDNA’s team communication software is solving a problem organizations in all industries face.
““Very few businesses attempt to accelerate global trade and the work of the millions of people that work in it. In order to execute your vision you have had to build a tech platform that is much more profound than most enterprise startups contemplate. You have deep customer relationships and the potential for structural advantages that few startups at your stage have. I knew I had to be part of your story.” – Mike Chalfen, Chalfen Ventures
The road to Series A was as enlightening as it was exciting. But we’re even more excited for what’s next—and how this funding will help us continue to transform the way high-volume and enterprise teams work.
Below, SEDNA CEO Bill Dobie reflects on this journey and what’s next for SEDNA, our customers, and the future of team communication.
CEO Bill Dobie on SEDNA’s $10M Series A Funding
SEDNA was always designed to make team communication faster, more productive, and more reliable, and it’s this vision that first inspired us to raise funds. We couldn’t have imagined what this would mean in 2020—that a Series A would not only help us further realize this vision, but help the companies and people across 80 countries who rely on SEDNA weather a major obstacle brought on by an incredibly challenging year.
As Jan Rindbo, CEO of NORDEN commented when COVID-19 first hit:
“The trading floors in our offices may be empty, but our virtual trading floors with teams working remotely are buzzing with activity and keeping the wheels of global trade turning to deliver essential…products to customers worldwide.”
The same challenges are being faced by businesses across industries. SEDNA creates one home for all internal and external communication, providing transparency and context for the information that’s truly important. Teams are empowered to work more efficiently, collaboratively, autonomously, and free from endless email cycles—especially when working remotely.
Which is why I’m more excited than ever about SEDNA’s Series A investment of $10M and the team involved. The funding round was co-led by early-stage solo VC Mike Chalfen and Stride.VC’s Harry Stebbings, who have also joined our board. And we’re pleased to have had so many key strategic investors participate in the round, including SAP.io, Stéphane Kurgan, Kurt Björklund, Stephen Harper, Ulf Zetterberg, and Charlie Songhurst.
The Potential of SEDNA
We’ve now worked for many years with some of the world’s leading companies in industries like logistics, commodities, and financial services, and witnessed firsthand the difficulties they faced tackling the explosion and overwhelm of business complexity. While massive investment in infrastructure and the creation of in-house tools has made these companies more efficient and increasingly data-driven, the way they interact with customers, suppliers, and each other has remained fundamentally stagnant—via email.
As customer expectations rise along with the sheer volume of conversations and data, managing internal and external communication has become one of the biggest bottlenecks in business today. The average knowledge worker spends hours every day in their inbox, trying to identify what’s relevant to them, searching for data in old emails, and chasing down information, context, and facts from colleagues and disjointed systems across the organization.
“The number of emails in the inbox…with SEDNA was instantly reduced by 95%, which is huge…[Our previous email system] was at the max of its capacities in processing 1,300 emails per day. We were storing and processing so many emails that dragging and dropping an email from the inbox to the designated folder was taking up to five to 10 seconds per email.
We reduce the risk of overlooking emails as people are now only seeing the emails that were intended for them with SEDNA. Everyone using another tool for team email is living in the past.” – Berend Luger, Glencore Agriculture
By aligning teams through action-based communication, SEDNA drastically reduces messaging and communication volume and eradicates duplication of effort. One of the joys of launching SEDNA across thousands of teams worldwide at major international companies, such as Glencore, Western Bulk, Bunge, Ardmore, and NORDEN, is seeing how the noise and chaos of individual mailboxes is stripped away. People are empowered to make faster and more informed decisions every single day.
Staying the Course While Expanding Horizons
As efficient digital collaboration has become so important, and all commerce distributed, we’ve seen the growth in our customers’ expansive use of SEDNA. Teams in finance, human resources, procurement, legal, risk, and execution have transformed the way they work and communicate with SEDNA’s software. We’re seeing new use cases emerge daily, both within customer enterprises and in new sectors tackling similar challenges.
“Creating an effective nervous system to enable large organisations to run their business and serve their clients more effectively is an incredibly hard problem to solve. We loved Bill’s vision of a ground-up rethink and were blown away that tier I organisations would move completely off email and onto SEDNA for mission-critical parts of their operation.” – Harry Stebbings, Stride.VC
Our entire global team is built to deliver team communication software of the highest quality and reliability. It’s an opportunity to build an innovative and global company that dramatically improves the way teams communicate and businesses work. We’ve already added world-class talent at all levels of SEDNA and look forward to bringing more leaders in enterprise software to join us on this journey.
Finding “a Better Way”
Observing how people really get things done; understanding their lived work experiences and why it matters to their companies is at the heart of how I create software. It’s what I love about my work and this empathy is at the centre of what we do—it’s how our talented and diverse team invents better ways.
Today, that “better way” is what unites our investors and the SEDNA team, and it’s right at the heart of global work. Effective communication is pivotal to the success of the global economy, and I’m confident our software will become a hub for all communication within business.
In short, SEDNA’s future is to become an entire enterprise nervous system. And we’re beyond excited to realize it.
– Bill Dobie
See What SEDNA Can Do for Your Team
Join us for a future of more effective, scalable, and productive team communication. Download SEDNA’s free Product Overview or book a personalized demo to learn more.