Parabol Raises $8m Series A Led by M12

We’re thrilled to announce today that Parabol has raised an $8million Series A led by M12 – Microsoft’s Venture Fund – with continued participation by CRV and Haystack. Our Series A comes 15 months after our Series Seed round, which was led by Slack, CRV and Haystack. 

Our whole team is excited to be working with M12 as we grow Parabol’s agile meeting platform beyond 100,000 registered users and broaden our product offering to cover more of the agile lifecycle.

Parabol was founded in 2015 to challenge the workplace status quo and help teams find more meaningful ways of working together. Now we have the backing to bring those new ways of working to agile and non-agile teams around the world. 

We started on our journey building a check-in meeting tool to help teams get updated on each others’ work and build transparency and accountability. Then we created a retrospective meeting tool to help teams build a habit of inspecting their work together on a regular basis to make continuous improvements.

Now we’ve added an additional member to the family, by launching a new Sprint Poker meeting type.

More about that below!

Since working hard to raise our seed round in November 2019, Parabol has come a long way. 

Just months after our seed financing, interest in remote work tools exploded in response to COVID-19 lockdowns. Week on week we saw record-breaking traffic and signups. 

When we founded Parabol remote work was more the exception than the norm. Our current global reality has flipped that dynamic – almost everyone has had a remote work experience.

We’re confident that remote work is here to stay, in one form or another – whether it presents itself as globally distributed teams, fully remote organizations, or hybrid arrangements.

And we’re excited to use these new funds to expand the range of agile meetings our product covers and to build out much-requested features and integrations that we previously did not have capacity to build. 

It all begins with hiring more talent onto our fully remote and distributed team. If you’re excited about helping teams meet better and derive more meaning from working together, please take a look at our open roles.

We’d love to hear from you.

We’re starting our next chapter by thickening the value teams get out of Parabol. Now anyone can start using Sprint Poker for free. Paid users will also be able to benefit from Sprint Poker within their existing plans. 

Sprint Poker offers teams a better and more engaging way to get on the same page about work during the planning phase of projects or sprints. 

It uses the popular planning poker format to help teams estimate how much effort different pieces of work require, so they can plan their time accordingly.

With Sprint Poker, Parabol connects the agile lifecycle from beginning to end, sitting alongside the existing check-in and retrospective meeting types. 

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Transparency is core to who we are. That’s why Parabol has always been open source.

We publicly share our metrics every week. We share details about how Parabol’s employees work together. And, we even expose Parabol’s product backlog to the public. This means any member of the public can add product suggestions or enhancements or report bugs. 

We believe working in the open leads to a more meaningful work life, because we are able to have direct relationships with the users and customers we serve, as well as ultimately producing a better product. 

So to all of our users: thank you. For the feedback you so openly share with us. For using the product week in, week out. And for joining us on this journey.