Shopify-incubated Ottawa startup Fellow raises US$24-million as meeting-management software sales surge

Fellow Insights Inc., an Ottawa meeting management software provider that owes much of its early success to Shopify Inc., has raised US$24-million in a venture capital financing led by San Francisco’s Craft Ventures.

Fellow makes a software tool aimed at making meetings ranging from one-on-ones to town halls more productive by enabling quick generation of checklist items, follow up-actions and notes by participants during the gatherings. It suggests topics, monitors progress on action items over time and syncs with calendars, email and workplace communication platform Slack.

The startup has more than 800 corporate customers – more than triple the size of a year ago – and should surpass 1,000 by year’s end, CEO Aydin Mirzaee told the Globe and Mail. Revenues, now in the millions of dollars annually, are on track to quadruple this year compared to 2020, he added. Customers include publicly traded tech companies Shopify, VerticalScope Inc., HubSpot Inc., Lemonade Inc. and Warby Parker Inc.. Past investors Inovia Capital. Felicis Ventures and Garage Ventures also participated in the financing, along with Formentera Capital and Silicon Valley Bank

The initial idea for Fellow stemmed from a suggestion by Mr. Mirzaee’s friend, Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke to the serial entrepreneur in the late 2010s. Mr. Mirzaee had left SurveyMonkey in 2016, two years after selling his second startup to the online survey company for more than US$50-million. He was looking to start another company with previous co-founders Amin Mirzaee, the chief product officer and his younger brother, and their friend Sam Cormier Iijima, the chief technology officer.

Mr. Lutke suggested the trio build a feedback tool that integrated with Slack and he agreed to let Shopify be it first guinea pig customer. Mr. Lutke then tweeted about Fellow’s launch in October 2018, which prompted several tech companies to sign up.

“We definitely benefited greatly by having them as the first customer,” Mr. Mirzaee said. “It was a large launching ground and a very special place for us. A lot of people want to do what Shopify does, so it gets mentioned often in sales calls. It’s a prime reference.”

Shopify president Harley Finkelstein said in a text message “a large percentage of managers at Shopify use Fellow with their teams” for meetings and that it was effective at integrating with other workplace tools including online calendars and video communication apps. “It just works,” Mr. Finkelstein said. “Fellow is tackling one of the biggest problems for knowledge workers, which is meetings. So much time is spent on [meetings] and they need to be run effectively – that’s where Fellow shines.”

Fellow’s growth has accelerated during the pandemic as more people used their computers and handheld devices than before during virtual and hybrid meetings, enabling greater use of its software, Mr. Mirzaee said. While the company offers a free version for early customers and up to 10 people at a company, about 20 to 25 per cent of customers pay, he said.

Startups that build productivity tools often “don’t have that benefit of knowing how enterprise customer would use them,” said Craft partner Lainy Painter. “Having that relationship [with Shopify] early on is super beneficial to the product roadmap” and for helping it learn how to scale within a large customer. Fellow, she added, has the momentum to “scale up quickly. It has product market fit, happy users and users that are emphatic in spreading the word and bringing more people on the platform.

Sameer Lalji, chief product officer with VerticalScope, said he was skeptical about Fellow at first after joining the Toronto digital media company, where the tool is widely used, in spring 2020. “At first I thought, ‘Oh God, another tool to…enter my information into that would add more overhead than it’s worth.” But once he started using it “my experience completely turned around.” He now uses it regularly in meetings and said it has helped him saved time and be better organized. He’s also recommended it to other companies.. “Once you’re in it it’s very addictive.”

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