Today startup Kipwise, the creator of a new ‘search engine’ knowledge management tool for companies, has raised €400K from Icebreaker.vc and angel investors from Germany.
Founded in 2018 by Kwun-Lok Ng (based in Tallin, Estonia), Charlie Mak and Amanda Wong, Kipwise aims to build a ‘Google search engine’ to organise the internal knowledge of companies. Ensuring good knowledge sharing is vital to the success of a company – it impacts the speed of onboarding, team productivity and prevents knowledge leaks when employees leave. However, when mentioning ‘knowledge management’, words that one often associates the phrase with are – boring, tedious, time-consuming and the list goes on.
“It sounds boring because the process is tedious. That’s why we’re redefining knowledge management,” says CEO and co-founder Kwun-Lok Ng on why he and his co-founders started Kipwise. “We spoke to more than 200 companies and found that over 90% are unhappy with the knowledge management tool that they’re using. The tools are clumsy to use, detached from your daily workflow, require lots of manual effort to save knowledge and have limited search capabilities.”
The way teams communicate has changed a lot in recent years. Nowadays, teams often rely on multiple tools to get their job done and it’s time-consuming and distracting to document important knowledge from the fragmented communication.
Kipwise simplifies the whole flow by integrating with tools that companies use every day, such as Slack, Google Drive, Chrome and Trello. Kipwise serves as a layer on top of all your tools, so you can save new knowledge and access saved knowledge directly within your daily workflow, with just a few clicks. This way, even the busiest person in your team can contribute to knowledge management with minimal effort.
Another trend that makes better knowledge management so important is the rise of remote work, especially now during Coronavirus mitigation measures. Kipwise truly understands these challenges because they are a 100% remote team with teammates in Estonia, Brazil, Croatia, Taiwan and Hong Kong. “Even us three co-founders have been working remotely since the beginning,” says Kwun. “Although remote working has now become common, many people are still skeptical about remote co-founders. Prior to starting Kipwise, we’ve experienced working together for 4+ years building a startup from scratch, so we are very familiar with each other’s working style and that has made our collaboration much easier.”
Currently, Kipwise has customers from over 53 different countries. Around 83% of managers and seniors engage with their tool weekly, and distributed/remote teams account for 66% of their customer base.
Just like its team composition, the journey behind Kipwise is global. With the team’s strong experience in growing B2B SaaS innovations internationally, Kipwise has attracted investments from Techstars London, and now more recently Icebreaker.vc and two German angel investors. It aims to use the fresh funds to expand its product to teams all over the world, remote and in-office, and help them work more efficiently.
via https://www.AiUpNow.com/ by contact@bcurdy.com, Khareem Sudlow
