Workshop, a company that provides an email platform for internal communications, announced today that it has raised $12 million in Series A funding. McCarthy Capital led the round as part of its Emerging Growth strategy. It also had the backing of several prominent Midwest venture funds, including Ludlow Ventures and M25.
This additional round of funding comes just 18 months after a $5 million seed round in July 2022. The workshop has gained hundreds of customers and delivered emails to well over a million employees in the last year, making it one of the fastest-growing internal communication platforms. It is now the preferred tool for employee-facing emails at Fortune 500 companies and household names around the world, including Papa John’s, Steve Madden, Edelman Financial, Northern Tool, Movement Mortgage, and others.
“We are excited to continue to support Workshop as they invest further in expanding their team and product,” said BJ Hansen, Managing Director at McCarthy Capital. “Workshop is committed to being the leading internal communications platform, allowing its customers to better connect and engage with their employees.”
Rick Knudtson (former co-founder of Flywheel), Ben Stevinson, and Derek Homann (former founders of Median) co-founded Workshop in 2020. The group came together with the goal of assisting other organizations in creating a positive, engaging company culture through effective internal communication. The most recent round of funding emphasizes Workshop’s critical role in distributed and global teams, which frequently struggle to create alignment and deliver engaging, relevant content to their employees.
“We’ve loved working with McCarthy Capital over the last 18 months and couldn’t be happier to continue our journey with them,” said Rick Knudtson, CEO and co-founder. “We share a passion for this market as well as a big vision for how our product can impact it.” I’m excited to continue investing in Workshop’s platform and teams as we work to make more Mondays happy for employees everywhere!”
The funds will be used to accelerate the innovation of Workshop’s simple internal email solution, recruit additional talent for the engineering team, scale Workshop’s go-to-market efforts, including expanding sales and marketing, and provide additional support to the customer success team.
“Workshop is gearing up for an incredible year, and we’re excited to add even more talent to the team in Omaha and beyond,” said Derek Homann, Chief Operating Officer and co-founder. “We believe in our mission to create happy Mondays for our own team, too, and can’t wait to make 2024 a year of growth, innovation, and shared success!”
Workshop also announced the official launch of its new communications calendar feature, which joins a suite of workflow-enhancing tools that assist internal communications teams with email management at scale. Communicators can now see every email sent and every email scheduled in a single calendar view, giving their messages the best chance of being read. The workshop can help manage internal emails across global, distributed teams and enterprises when combined with features like sharing and privacy settings, dynamic distribution lists, and AI-assisted content recommendations.