Active Capital
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Proving voicemail doesn’t have to be wack, the Slack-backed startup Yac raises $7.5 million
Yac, the Orlando, Florida-based startup that’s digitizing voice messages for remote offices, has raised $7.5 million in a new round of funding.
The company’s service has garnered enough attention to pick up a pretty sizable new round from investors led by GGV Capital and a return investment from the Slack Fund.
Apparently, reinventing voicemail is a multi-million-dollar endeavor.
“The future of meetings will be asynchronous, in your ears and hands-free,” says Pat Matthews, the chief executive and founder of Active Capital, when the company announced its seed round nearly a year ago.
Co-founded by Justin Mitchell, Hunter McKinley and Jordan Walker, Yac was spun out of the digital agency SoFriendly, and was developed as a pitch for Product Hunt’s Maker Festival. The voice messaging service won that startup competition at the event and attracted the interest of Boost VC and its founder, the third-generation venture capitalist Adam Draper.
About six months after that seed round, Yac received outreach from Slack thanks to a referral from another entrepreneur. Throughout their negotiations last year, the teams used Yac to conduct due diligence, according to Mitchell. At the time of the company’s August announcement that Slack had come on to finance the company, Yac had a bit over 5,000 users on its service; it charges per seat, in the same way Slack does.
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Austin-based ReturnSafe raises $3.25 million for its employee health management tools
ReturnSafe, a symptom checking and contact tracing employee health management toolkit for businesses, has raised $3.25 million in financing from investors including Fifty Years and Active Capital.
With companies looking to reopen operations and have their employees return to work safely, management toolkits that track employee health are piling into the market offering all sorts of strategies to maintain a safe work environment.
These include offerings from companies like WorkSafe; or the ProtectWell tool from Microsoft and UnitedHealth; or NSpace, which has similar features and a scheduling tool for booking office space safely.
For its part, ReturnSafe is boasting six-figure monthly recurring revenue and is working with 50 organizations since its launch six months ago.
The pitch to investors and customers is that the need to manage employees and ensure that workspaces are free from health risks is only going to grow in a post-COVID-19 world.
Of course, the best way for employers to ensure the safety and security of their employees is to provide adequate leave and time off if employees are sick, and to ensure that everyone has access to adequate testing at regular intervals should they not be able to work remotely.
Like other companies in the market, ReturnSafe offers a symptoms screener, a testing dashboard, a case management dashboard and a new vaccine management service. In addition to those software tools, ReturnSafe pitches a set of wearable devices with built-in social distancing alarms to ensure that employees maintain safe distances.
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