London-based culture-as-a-service startup Unlock raises $2m in seed investment

by Startacus Admin

Investment success for Unlock, the startup that's aiming to help companies to build culture and sense of belonging among their remote teams

Great news to start the week for London-based startup Unlock - the SaaS-enabled marketplace to build culture among remote teams, has raised a $2m seed round. The round was led by La Famiglia, with other investors including Kima Ventures, Antler, GuideStar Ventures and several well-known angels.

The labour market is extremely competitive at the moment and having a strong team culture is key to attracting and retaining talent. That, coupled with the growth in hybrid working, means that companies are having to think of new digitally-inclusive ways to create emotional attachment and loyalty among their teams.

Unlock is on a mission to help companies to build that culture and sense of belonging. It gives workplaces an online venue packed with curated interactive experiences to end the struggle to build remote team cohesion. It has over 300 purpose-built bite-size conversation starters and games, and over 50 curated experiences from virtual activity creators - ranging from an origami lesson hosted from Tokyo to an interactive songwriting session hosted by a professional band. Companies can also opt to receive personalised cultural calendars featuring a range of different activities every month. 

And although the pandemic has accelerated the need for employee engagement platforms, unlike others, Unlock isn’t trying to build a virtual office and recreate a physical environment online, but instead has created a digital first experience that makes it easier to build healthy remote team cultural habits through meaningful and fun activities, whilst adding a new source of revenue for virtual event creators.

Maria Wlosinska, Co-Founder and CEO of Unlock explains: ““We’re in the midst of a culture shift. The companies we work with realise that in order to stay ahead in the talent war, they have to put a strong culture at the core, but that’s not always easy to do in practice. At Unlock, we know that with the right tools and content, gathering as a team online can be easy, engaging and really fun. By providing the cultural infrastructure for companies, they don’t have to spend hours researching and managing how to drive culture in their teams. We make sure there is enough content variability within our platform and the experiences on Unlock are curated to feel refreshing and inspiring for teams to come back regularly.”

Judith Dada, La Famiglia’s General Partner, said: “We are at the dawn of the Golden Age of the Employee: in the ever fiercer fight for talent, the cultural empowerment of employees is one of the biggest levers companies have on their quest to being successful, but also a real challenge for fully remote, hybrid, or geographically distributed teams. Given their remote team setup and expertise in the space of team culture, we felt Unlock had a unique insight to solving this challenge. Culture is not defined by a meeting, but by human connections and Unlock enables deeper team experiences purpose-built for connection and fun”.

Incidentally, remote working and workplace culture will be very much on the radar at our upcoming Work: In Progress event. We’d love you to join us if you can!

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Published on: 29th October 2021