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Today is a big day for us. Over the past year, we’ve developed a vision to make meetings and remote working healthier. We looked at new and existing products, and realised today’s meeting experience is disjointed and frustrating, whether it’s setting up a call with someone, trying to remember what was discussed, or catching up with meetings you’ve missed.
With that in mind, we decided to build Clearword with the lofty goal of unifying the meeting experience at every stage of the meeting lifecycle: before, during, and after the meeting.
We then embarked on the ambitious journey of positively redesigning that meeting experience, based on the tools you use and love. Plan, schedule and prepare for meetings in a truly collaborative manner, and have those meetings transcribed and automatically summarised into searchable and shareable meeting minutes. All your meetings in one easily accessible and searchable central meetings library.
Today we are excited to announce that we have raised $3.25M in funding led by Connect Ventures to execute on that vision. Along with my two other co-founders, Clodagh Monks (CTO) and Daire Irwin (CPO), we have been very selective in picking our investors and are grateful to have found people who are truly product-driven, and 100% invested in our vision.
Even though funding announcements are frequent, to us this funding round means a lot more that just product acceleration. Our investors are behind us to build a new type of company. A remote-first company who understands life-work balance. A remote-first company who understands that people want and should grow personally and professionally. A remote-first company we want to work for.
To that extent, we wanted to take a few moments to introduce them.
Connect Ventures
Our thesis is simple: We believe that digital meetings were never meant to be like this. Old bad habits have been translated online and are causing modern meetings to be run inefficiently. A better approach is critical for remote and hybrid work to truly become ubiquitous.
Connect is a thesis-led venture capital firm. They exist to invest in the best product-led companies in Europe at seed stage. Their investment thesis captures what they believe are the defining ingredients required to create the most valuable product companies. We couldn’t be prouder to be working with Pietro Bezza, whose experience in SaaS businesses is invaluable and passion is contagious. Pietro is one of the very few visionary investors who follows through on his ideology, as well as his support.
Act Venture Capital
Act partners early with visionary founders and support them from inception to scale. Act has a very diverse set of expertise, and shares the entrepreneurial values of their founders, with a determination to build extraordinary companies.
After meeting with Andrew O’Neill from Act, we knew we wanted to work with him. His empathy for founders and early teams resonated deeply with all of us.
HelloWorld.VC
For those of you who have met Rodrigo Martinez and HellowWorld.VC, you already know the extent of his analytical mind. He is a deep analytical thinker, with extensive hands-on experience. Previously at Point9 and Index, Rodrigo has the ability to tease out the weaknesses and really help you address them head on in a structured and constructive manner.
Tony Jamous, Oyster
Tony is the CEO of Oyster HR. Oyster is a product to manage HR, payroll, and automate compliance across 180+ countries—all in one, easy-to-use platform.
Tony is a lot more than Oyster. He is the textbook definition of a thought-leader when it comes to remote-work. Tony gets it and is a constant source of inspiration and aspiration.
Luca Martinetti, TrueLayer
Luca is the CTO of TrueLayer. If you don’t know TrueLayer, they are a fintech company opening up access to banking. Recently they became a unicorn 🦄.
Luca, just like Tony, is also an experienced operator and an innovator in his field. His support and insight in the fintech field, as well as his experience in a rapidly growing company is critical and invaluable.
Pat Phelan
If you’re involved in startups in Ireland, you know the name. Pat is a repeat founder, and a very dedicated entrepreneur. He is involved in a variety of ventures and companies. His last company TrustEV sold to TransUnion in 2015. Since then, Pat has invested and helped numerous companies, and co-founded SISU Aesthetics. We are glad to call him a friend and an investor.
Dave Concannon
A few years ago the Clearword founding team had a cybersecurity startup called Barricade.io which sold to cybersecurity industry leader Sophos. Dave was an investor in Barricade and we are proud to have him believe in us once more with Clearword.
Dave is a technologist and has co-founded Hosted Graphite, a company whose customers include EA, VistaPrint and Salesforce amongst many. He brings that rare combination of business acumen, creativity and understanding of technology to the table.
Unpopular Ventures
Last but not least, we want to introduce Chris Murphy with Unpopular Ventures. Chris has proven time and time again to be the right connector for our company. Chris was previously the Head of Platform at WebSummit, and a co-founder of popular SaaStock. Chris brings a wealth of SaaS B2B knowledge, with a contagious amount of creativity.
Building Lasting Relationships
Figuring out the perfect combination of truly supportive institutional investors and angel investors is always hard, for any startup. After having carefully picked what we consider to be a set of investors with complementary value-add, we are thrilled to embark this journey with them to build the platform for your meetings.
To everyone who has supported us so far. To every single person who has signed up, to our early access users and beta testers and to our investors: Thank you for believing in us 🙏🙏
Clearword - meetings redesigned.
With love and anticipation,
— David
