Team Communication Software Sedna raises $10m Series A Led by Chalden Ventures and Stride.

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3 December 2020 - SEDNA Systems (“SEDNA”), the smart team communication software provider that unifies all messages, data, and documentation, has raised $10M in Series A funding to empower the world’s leading corporations to work more efficiently and collaboratively.

This funding comes on the back of strong growth in 2020, with global trade leaders such as Glencore, NORDEN, and Bunge joining a 65-strong client roster. SEDNA has enabled mission-critical teams at these leading organizations to increase the trust, speed, and efficiency with which they run their business and serve customers.

Empowering Global and Remote Teams Through Streamlined Communications

Founded in 2017, SEDNA was created based on the simple but powerful insight that email— designed for individual users—was fundamentally broken when it came to the needs of large, complex organizations and teams, particularly those operating in global, distributed environments. The “cc effect” of endless threads, opacity of siloed inboxes, and administrative burden that comes with disjointed systems was stifling the speed and productivity of teams across these organizations.

Instead of building a “better email” or yet another collaboration tool, Bill Dobie and his team realized this was a ubiquitous problem across industries and set about fundamentally rethinking email, messaging data, and documentation in a fully integrated manner. This resulted in a software platform that enables teams to operate seamlessly on complex transactions, with dramatic results for its customers.

Global trade leaders like Glencore Agriculture, NORDEN, Bunge, and Western Bulk have drastically reduced their email volume—by up to 95%. This reduced the distraction, management efforts, fragmentation of information, and governance along with it. More importantly, SEDNA has enabled them to increase the trust, efficiency, and collaborative capability with which they run their business and serve customers.

“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

SEDNA’s initial customer group hails from the logistics and commodities world, but the problem is prevalent in all industries. Following strong customer growth and interest from global leaders in transport, industrials, and financial services, Bill Dobie and his team have raised an additional $10M in Series A funding to respond to customer demand in other verticals—and scale SEDNA’s capacity to serve global clients across the world.

The round was co-led by early-stage solo VC Mike Chalfen at Chalfen Ventures and Harry Stebbings at Stride.VC, with participation from SAP.iO Fund’s Emmanuel Cassimatis and notable angels Stéphane Kurgan, Kurt Björklund, Stephen Harper, Ulf Zetterberg, and Charlie Songhurst.

The need for effective team communication solutions was further emphasized by the 2020 pandemic. One of many challenges COVID-19 brought on was the expedited adoption of remote work in businesses all over the world. The significance of SEDNA’s mission was highlighted during this time, allowing customers to transition and continue to focus on productivity without having to overhaul their processes around communication. Internal use expanded throughout finance, legal, risk, human resources, and operational teams, among others. Interest from, and use cases in, new sectors quickly began to emerge.

“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

“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 one organisations would move completely off email and onto SEDNA for mission-critical parts of their operation.”

Harry Stebbings, Stride.VC

“Companies that handle large volumes of information and transactions experience challenges with the high volumes of communications and noise created with them. These companies are increasingly asking for dedicated systems to handle information, streamline communications and interactions, and enable team collaboration. SEDNA brings a fresh solution to this issue by consolidating in a secure environment some of the most important components for collaboration: connectivity, data extraction, workflow management, document repository, and commenting and tagging. A true step forward.”

Emmanuel Cassimatis, SAP.iO Fund

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What’s Next

SEDNA will continue to focus on building innovative software that transforms the way global and remote teams work—scaling within customer relationships, growing in trusted industries, and expanding to new verticals. They’ve already added expert and world-class talent in several departments and leadership roles and look forward to further growing their team. By creating a single, shared source of truth for all discussions and content, they envision a future as the “nervous system” of any enterprise organization.

“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.”

Bill Dobie, Founder and CEO, SEDNA

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About SEDNA

SEDNA builds smart team communication software that unifies all messages, data, and documentation to help you focus on the work that matters. By aligning teams through action-based communication, SEDNA drastically reduces email volume and creates more efficient, productive, and collaborative workflows across organizations. Learn more at sedna.com.

Press Contact Details

Sedna

press@sedna.com 

Phone: +44 7917 030 828

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