Employee-focussed social network Mesh raises funding from Y Combinator, others

By Narinder Kapur

  • 21 Aug 2020
Credit: Thinkstock

People Mesh, Inc., an internal social networking platform focussed on employees, has raised funding from investment firms and angel backers.

Participants in the round include United States-based investor and accelerator Y Combinator, which confirmed its investment via a tweet. 

Others that have committed to the California- and Gurugram-based startup include seed-stage Liquid 2 Ventures and founders of startups such as Cure.fit, CleverTap, and Meesho.

Angel investors including Xiaomi’s Indonesia director Alvin Tse, Mercury founder Immad Akhund, and angel investor Sumon Sandhu also took part in the funding exercise, The Economic Times reported.

The funding sum was not disclosed.

Mesh, founded earlier this year by Saurabh Nangia, Rahul Singh, and Gaurav Chaubey, says its platform provides employees features such as tracking daily and weekly tasks, managing long-term goals, and receiving feedback from managers. 

Goals can also be broken down, and some can also be marked as private.

The company says it also provides a Facebook-like social feed that helps employers and employees interact with one another to recreate the feel of a physical office environment. 

Mesh says some of its future plans for its product include integrating data from third parties such as customer relationship management platforms.

“At present, corporates typically use two disparate platforms, one for managing their monthly and quarterly goals, and another one for managing their daily and weekly deliverables,” Nangia said, per The Economic Times report.

“The goal is to capture real-time data about employees and start giving these insights back to both employees as well as the leaders and the managers within the company,” he added. 

Mesh says some of its early customers include startups such as 1mg, ClearTax, Sharechat, and Fampay.

The investment in Mesh is another sign of growing interest in startups seeking to mitigate the socio-physical impact of global lockdowns caused by Covid-19. 

Startups in sectors such as edtech and social networking across stages have raised funding from international and domestic investors.

Earlier this week, tutors and tutor-student connectivity-focussed Teachmint raised an undisclosed sum in a round led by early-stage investor Better Capital, with participation from Titan Capital, the venture firm set up by Snapdeal co-founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal.

Last week, online climate school Terra.do Inc. raised $1.4 million in seed funding led by a few early-stage investment firms, including Beenext, technology-focused fund Rainmatter Capital and Stanford Angels & Entrepreneurs (India).

In social networking, several companies are seeking to fill the void left by a ban on Chinese applications by the Indian government. Earlier this week, Mitron TV Pvt Ltd raised $5 million (around Rs 37.41 crore) in a Series A round led by Nexus Venture Partners. 3one4 Capital and top angel investors also took part.

Other startups in this space that have raised funding in recent months include Trell, which earlier this week said it raised around Rs 85 crore in Series A funding led by South Korea’s KTB Network.