Employee support startup Atomicwork launches from stealth to tackle employee experience at work which 80% of bosses acknowledge is not fit for purpose
September 5, 2023 – San Francisco, California: As workers remain split between working from home and returning to offices, bosses are eager to ensure they have a healthy employee experience. Helping workers feel connected with everyday work needs, employee support startup Atomicwork is today announcing launch from stealth with an $11m seed funding round to boost the employee experience of workers around the world.
The funding round was led by Blume Ventures and Matrix Partners with participation from Storm Ventures, Neon Fund, and prominent angel investors.
Employee experience is a critical item on the CEO and CIO agenda as employees return to offices. Atomicwork leverages AI to solve this problem while simplifying the number of tools employees interact with every day. Atomicwork sits on top of collaboration tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams and uses conversational intelligence to automate support, service delivery, and operations at scale.
Atom, Atomicwork’s AI assistant, learns from company processes and tribal knowledge to assist employees with their questions and requests without human intervention. The platform features the ability to have different service teams like IT, HR, Finance, and Legal work in their own private spaces while providing a unified experience for employees and efficiency for the enterprise.
“All of us have experienced the pain of broken experiences as employees, and we have all wondered why it has to be so frustrating,” said Vijay Rayapati, CEO and Co-Founder of Atomicwork. “Throughout our careers, Kiran, Parsuram and I have been part of fast-growing companies where a lot of time gets lost navigating cumbersome internal systems and processes. After speaking to more than 100 businesses about this, it became evident that this problem was worth solving.”
Whilst in stealth, the Atomicwork team surveyed leaders from mid-market businesses and large corporations and found that 8 out of 10 bosses were unsatisfied with the worker experience their companies offered. Indeed, they conceded that it adversely impacted their employees’ morale and productivity. The findings correlate with industry studies from WTW in 2022, which also found that 92% of employers across industries intend to invest in their employee experience stack over the next three years.
”Employees are still far away from being considered internal customers by service teams because of arbitrary boundaries between the back office and the rest of the company. They implement too many point solutions and complex processes, leading to productivity loss and unnecessary friction. Our goal with Atomicwork is to help companies offer a great experience with good efficiency,” commented Vijay Rayapati. “With Atomicwork, we’re looking to help companies go from employee support to employee success. We believe every employee can drive growth and impact the business’s bottom line. By helping them move faster and accelerating productivity, we help deliver a culture of employee success aligned with business outcomes”.
This vision also resonated with Atomicwork’s investors from day one, who came on board with a significant seed investment. “Our decision to back Atomicwork was driven by our belief in how Vijay, Kiran, and Parsuram are reimagining the idea of employee success. Blume’s relationship with this special group of entrepreneurs began many years ago, thanks to a prior fund. We’re very excited to invest in this transformative space and support Atomicwork as they reshape the future of employee experience and success,” said Sanjay Nath, Partner at Blume Ventures.
Pranay Desai, Principal at Matrix Partners, echoed this sentiment, “The problem of employee support and experience has been crying out for innovation, and the way Vijay and his team at Atomicwork are approaching the solution, with a completely modern and user-led approach, is thrilling for us. Add to this the fact that this is an experienced team that understands well how to build world-class products; we are delighted to be part of this journey.”
Arun Penmetsa, Partner at Storm Ventures, said, “The proliferation of HR and IT solutions in the last 20 years has led to a huge number of tools for employees to interact with, resulting in delays and loss of productivity. Atomicwork provides a single self-service platform for a hybrid workforce that addresses this pain and dramatically improves the employee experience.”
Atomicwork was founded in September 2022 by Vijay Rayapati, Kiran Darisi and Parsuram Vijayasankar. Vijay is a SaaS veteran, whose startup Minjar was acquired in 2018 by Nutanix, where he served as VP and GM before leaving to start Atomicwork. Kiran and Parsuram were both part of the founding team of Freshworks and were instrumental in its rise from startup to public company in just over a decade.
