The extension was led by Chicago-based Energize Ventures, with investment from HighSage Ventures, SwissCanto, Thayer, Swisscom, Investiere, Alpana Ventures, and Swiss Post. 

The funding comes as companies across all sectors of the economy have embraced digital collaboration and communication tools in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. The new paradigm has been particularly impactful for frontline workers, many of which are in essential industries. Juan Muldoon, Partner at Energize Ventures, explained the timing of the firm’s decision to continue fueling the growth of Beekeeper, “Technology that supports frontline workers is more important than ever. We have long believed that Beekeeper is setting the standard for how the modern frontline workforce operates and communicates, but the current crisis has given new urgency to the company’s mission. Industries with largely deskless workforces - like energy and manufacturing - are digitising at an accelerating pace, and we believe this digital transformation is here to stay.”

With this surge of interest from industry experts such as Energize, Beekeeper is creating the future of work for frontline workforces. Evidence shows that companies with a unified digital workplace that goes beyond the head office are positioned to win in the coming years. Beekeeper’s platform enables efficient communication and collaboration for leaders in frontline industries through a scalable, central 'digital highway' that can extend across the enterprise.

Beekeeper is using the additional funding to expand its cloud marketplace for apps, solutions, and integrations and has announced a bold new evolution of its product: Beekeeper 2.0. While many companies in this space still focus on reaching frontline workers, Beekeeper goes one step further in digitally enabling them.

The updated product creates a single point of contact for people, processes, and systems to improve the productivity, agility, and safety of frontline workers. It eliminates language barriers, halves the time team leads spend coordinating with employees, and makes it easy for every single team member to access the tools and information they need, when they need it. 

Beekeeper 2.0 includes:

• Home: a new entry point for the app, providing access to all the most relevant information, data, and processes for every frontline worker.
• Automated translations into over 100 languages for all content in the platform, including chat messages, surveys, and company-wide confirmation campaigns.
• Digital forms and workflows for everyday business processes.
• Custom FAQ chatbots to answer questions on demand at scale in any language.
• Out-of-the-box integrations with SharePoint and popular shift scheduling software to make essential work information available to everyone, immediately.

Cristian Grossmann, CEO and Co-founder of Beekeeper, commented: “We take it as a tremendous vote of confidence that we have this type of backing in the current economic environment. We are using this opportunity to invest in innovation and solidify our position as the top communication and operations platform for frontline workers. This is our chance to expand our product offering to anticipate the needs of an evolving market.”

Beekeeper is currently connecting millions of global users across companies like Panera Bread and Mandarin Oriental. Juan Rojas, VP of HR at Wireless Vision, had the following to say about Beekeeper: “Our teams can easily communicate with the entire field, rather than relying on email or conference calls which no one pays attention to. We create streams where important information lives and it drastically reduces the amount of time spent searching for the items we need daily. We also use Beekeeper to connect all of our other apps so we have instant access to reviews, commissions, sales reports, recognition sites, HR sites, policy documents, and more!”