Workplace chat app Oneteam snags series A funding to do things different from Slack

Last summer, the startup behind workplace chat app Oneteam secured seed funding before it had even launched into closed beta. Today the company revealed that it now has US$1.7 million in series A funding to help it grow and battle well-established apps like Slack, Convo, Flowdock, and a ton of others.

It’s important for people to know each other.

In a rarity for a Japan-based startup, the entrepreneurs took Oneteam global from day one, with 85 percent of its corporate customers outside the country. Most of those are spread across Southeast Asia, explains Oneteam’s Yohei Miyasaka to Tech in Asia.

It’s no accident that the app is growing in Southeast Asia since founder and CEO Akira Sasaki is so familiar with the place. When he worked at Japanese HR giant Recruit, he served as a business development manager in Southeast Asia.

From that experience, he learned three things about how people work in the region – that it’s important for people to know each other in order to work together; sharing information and collaborating in the workplace is tough because everything’s split across a bunch of different tools; and enterprise communication sucks on mobile.

“He decided to make a new collaboration app to solve the communication issue,” says Yohei.

No GIFs

While there are plenty of apps in this niche, Oneteam is doing things a little differently based on what the CEO learned about workers in his previous job.

Teammates: Akira Sasaki and Kyohei Kondo co-founded the Tokyo-based startup.

“Slack and Flowdock are for engineers but Oneteam is for non-engineers,” says Yohei in response to my question about the two apps that we at Tech in Asia use.

“Slack and Flowdock manage flowing information, so engineers can talk [in a] real-time conversation. However, non-engineers cannot confirm information in real-time since they often move from their seat to have negotiations with their customers. Thus, we think [people] need a new communication tool [where] they can discuss in topics.”

That’s why Oneteam focuses more on topics and projects rather than a quick flow of text – or GIFs. And in some areas it looks more like email. Plus, it comes with a companion Oneteam Profile Book app so that teammates can get to know each other a bit better, with info pulled in from one’s Facebook.

Of course, Oneteam isn’t the only startup trying to build a less nerdy Slack. Just last week, Chatwork nabbed US$12.8 million in series B funding to shake up how regular small businesses collaborate.