These days, work isn’t done in meetings or boardrooms but on Slack, Dropbox, Zendesk and any other combination of office productivity apps.
The Slackification of work has made communication and collaboration easier than ever, but it has created one unintended consequence: Company data and work has never been more spread out. Elements of a project can be simultaneously buried in an avalanche of cat gifs on Slack, in a folder on Dropbox and in a field of saved files on Google Drive. Pulling it all together can defeat the purpose of the apps.
It can be even more challenging for a large corporation trying to track data across those sources to meet compliance regulations and legal requirements.
That’s where Onna comes in. Headquartered in New York, the company aims to centralize all that data across office productivity apps into one place and makes it easily searchable for enterprises. Those efforts haven’t gone unnoticed. Onna announced on Monday that it has closed a $11 million Series A round with investments from Dropbox and the Slack Fund.
Those investments serve as a validation for Onna’s mission, CEO and founder Salim Elkhou said.
“The fact that (Slack and Dropbox) invested in us is a big deal, and it’s further validation in what we’re doing,” Elkhou said. “Our mission is to bring these apps together. It’s not just working with their APIs but having a true partnership with these companies.”
Elkhou founded Onna in 2015 with the goal of bringing everyone’s data within a company into a single, searchable repository. The idea stemmed from his experience founding and running the ediscovery company eStet. He realized that the need to be able to search for information wasn’t just a legal issue but a companywide one.
“There’s more and more data, more information and it’s more disparate,” Elkhou said. “When I realized that a technical solution to bring everything together was needed, I left my role and we started working on this.”
Onna’s platform deploys machine learning to allow a company to search all its data within its productivity apps and SaaS products. For a global company, it can not only make life easier for employees working on a project but it also aids with meeting any legal compliance issues they may have. All it takes is one search to find all the data they may need to hand over or track.
Since Onna’s launch, its customers include Facebook, Electronic Arts, Dropbox, Fitbit and more.
With this round, the company, which has offices in New York and Barcelona, plans to double its team of 50 employees and grow its product.
“Our growth is fast lately, and we’re excited to be working on this,” Elkhou said. “Centralized information is becoming a big deal within IT infrastructure and how apps get built in the future.”
Dawn Capital led the round, with participation from Nauta Capital, as well as Dropbox and Slack. As part of the round Norman Fiore, general partner at Dawn Capital, will also join Onna’s board.
