Office check-in system Envoy raises $15M, signs up Rakuten as it expands to Japan

Things have apparently been busy at Envoy headquarters. The San Francisco-based startup announced today that it has raised a round of US$15 million led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with Chris Dixon slated to join Envoy’s board. The company also announced the addition of several new languages, including Japanese, to its app.

Envoy is a digital check-in service for offices that allows them to keep track of guests and employees more easily. It’s already used around the world at companies like Airbnb, Tesla, Gopro, and Lucasfilm, but Envoy founder Larry Gadea told Tech in Asia that the company’s Japanese expansion was inspired by another high-profile client: Rakuten. The Japanese ecommerce giant will now sign in office visitors using Envoy in fully localized Japanese.

Gadea says that Envoy’s global growth is both swift and ongoing, and despite the lack of Asian languages for the app – Japanese is the only one currently available – Envoy is growing in Asia. The company’s model, he says, is to track organic growth in a market using the English-language app. Once a market gets big enough, they’ll look at translating it into the local language. So while Japanese happens to be Envoy’s first Asian language, it probably won’t be its last.

Envoy also has quite a bit of Asian talent helping grease the wheels of its small team. A couple of Malaysian engineers were already working there when we talked to Envoy last year, and the company has since added a Taiwanese programmer, a data scientist from Singapore, and more. Gadea says that he’s been looking to Asia for talent because he’s found that Asia’s engineers tend to have very up-to-date knowledge. “The knowledge base [of Asian talent] is super up to date, which I love,” he said.

So what’s Envoy going to do with another US$15 million? Invest in more engineers (Gadea says he wants top talent) and new products. Envoy’s current product solves office check-in issues from the company’s perspective, but what about an app that simplifies check-ins from the user side, for someone who visits a lot of different offices? Or what about expansions to the existing Envoy product that tackle other office systems that could use improvement? Any – or perhaps all – of those things are in the company’s sights now, Gadea told me.