On Wednesday, Seattle-based community management startup Common Room launched out of stealth with $52 million in funding. The fresh financing comes courtesy of Greylock, Index and Madrona Venture Group, among others.
The company’s marketing software integrates with communication apps like Slack, Twitter, and Discord to better connect enterprise users with their customer base. Common Room’s platform provides audiences with the ability to share product feedback with a company’s marketing team in real time.
By doing so, Common Room aims to increase customer retention rates as well as the amount of shared knowledge across an enterprise. The startup has already worked with a group of test companies that include tech giants like Confluent, Figma and Notion.
“The awareness and importance of community to start ups has increased as companies build products based on open source with a developer audience and as end-users become more tech savvy and ready to interact directly with the company regardless of the product,” Soma Somasegar, managing director of Madrona, said in a statement.
Common Room co-founder and CEO Linda Lian was inspired to start the company in part due to her immigrant background. She left China with her grandparents at the age of five to come to the United States.
“Like immigrants, technology builders similarly need to be scrappy, triumphing over resource constraints to achieve huge goals.’” Lian said in a post to LinkedIn. “Technology now has a deeper impact on everyone’s day-to-day life, and as technology builders, we have a responsibility to bring more stakeholders into the fold.”
Those stakeholders need to include users, which is why Common Room touts a people-first approach on its platform.
“Times have changed. For the new generation, digital literacy comes nearly before real literacy.” Lian continued. “We learn about software from our friends and on the internet, and from our friends on the internet.”
Over time, the company plans to make its software available to product and customer support teams as well.
Lian told Forbes that, with the additional capital, Common Room plans to aggressively hire for remote and office-based positions at its Seattle headquarters. A majority of hires are being made on the company’s engineering and content teams.
Next Play Ventures and 01 Advisors participated in the round along with over 40 angel investors.
