London-based Blink, a smart employee platform, has raised €7.4 million in funding from Partech Partners and a group of angel investors. The startup has been working privately with 100 organisations in 14 countries including customers such as the British health service (NHS) and the British Prison Service, but the app launches publicly today.
The company, founded in 2015 by CEO Sean Nolan, designed the app to empower team members. It provides them with a single app to access all important information and systems and the ability to connect with their colleagues. Crucially, it supports employees who were previously disconnected from the workplace and it gives them a voice to feedback to managers and protects them by reducing transference risks.
On the company-side, managers can push out information to employees’ personal phones, like wellbeing and compliance messages, including Covid-19 updates. Blink also delivers tangible results for its customers: doubling employee engagement rates and dropping staff turnover by up to 26%.
For the past year, Blink has been partnering with frontline organisations to solve real-life problems for their workers. The first major rollout in January 2019 was for 22,000 employees at transport company Stagecoach. Employees can access rosters, complete digital forms for leave, absence and accidents, access digital payslips and feedback in real-time to managers on issues and concerns impacting them. Just two months into the lockdown, Blink had already been accessed 25 million times by frontline workers in numerous organisations.
So far in 2020, the Blink team has doubled in size and opened offices in Sydney and New York. Demand for their service has required a further recruitment drive, with plans to double in size again this summer. April saw the company growing at the fastest pace yet, as companies adopted Blink as part of their Covid-19 response, with the highest growth in the Healthcare and Care Home sectors.
Sean Nolan, CEO, Blink comments: “The Covid-19 crisis has underlined the critical role that frontline and key workers play in our society. The whole deskless workforce has been starved of investment. Now more than ever they need empowering with better tools so they can effectively perform their essential roles. Every worker needs instant access to the latest information around staying safe, a voice for feeding back to management, and the capability to support their peers on the frontline.”
Romain Lavault, General Partner, Partech comments: “Blink is the digital backbone of companies who run the real world and don’t sit behind a computer. Most organisations have realised during this crisis how much they depend on their frontline employees. It’s for the millions of essential nurses, bus drivers, construction workers or supply chain operators that run the economy. In just a year, Blink has already been adopted by more than 60,000 enterprise users in the UK, US and Australia who open the Blink app more than 15 times per day on average. This massive adoption is the best tribute to the incredible work done by Sean, Barry and the entire Blink team. We are thrilled to have been supporting them from Day 1 and look forward to the global expansion ahead!”
Blink is now opening up the platform so any company can get started immediately with a simple online set-up process via the company website. With a 14 day free trial, 24/7 support, and a 100 day money-back guarantee, companies can connect their entire workforces today.
via https://www.AiUpNow.com/ by contact@bcurdy.com, Khareem Sudlow
