As workplaces shift from remote to hybrid models, teams are looking for ways to conduct business that enable employees to be productive regardless of where they are working. The meeting management platform, Fellow, has announced a recent $24 million funding round, enabling Fellow to empower hybrid teams with tools that can help them manage their meetings.

The Series A round, announced on October 27th, was led by Craft Ventures with participation from iNovia, Felicis, Garage Ventures, Formentera, and SVB.

The investment in hybrid collaboration

The Series A round gives the company, which is headquartered in Ottawa, CA, a total of $30.5 million in funding. This will provide Fellow with the means to focus on product development as well as invest in talent acquisition. 

Investors are showing a lot of confidence in the larger collaboration & productivity software space, as there have been several companies that have received funding recently:

• Hera, a virtual meeting calendar, raised a  $1.7 million seed round led by Eurazeo in October 2021.
• Read, a dashboard for virtual meetings, raised a $10 million seed round on September 29, 2021, which will provide Read with the means to grow internally and focus on product development.
•  Vowel, another virtual meeting platform, announced a $13.5 million Series A funding round on September 7, 2021, allowing Vowel to grow its product, design, and engineering teams and prepare for a public launch later this year.

What Fellow does

Fellow’s platform includes features aimed at driving engagement and productivity with the goal of giving users the tools to run more effective meetings. The platform allows users to add action items to meetings, request and track feedback, and organize checklists in digital notepads.

Fellow also enables users to utilize these tools with external stakeholders. Vendors and clients, for example, are able to collaborate via a shared agenda, meeting notes, and action items.

Aside from meeting management, Fellow also provides users with tools to manage one-on-one’s, assess internal engagement, and provide performance feedback.

Tools for the hybrid workplace

With so many meetings taking place virtually, teams are looking for solutions to ensure that time spent in a video conference is well-spent. Meeting management software products have a moment to shine—and potentially change the way teams approach and conduct meetings by providing more structure, defining the purpose of meetings, and outlining action items as well as next steps. These tools can help streamline meetings and remove the ambiguity that some teams may deal with following a discussion.

In addition to meeting management tools, users are exploring other collaborative solutions to help navigate these hybrid waters. Collaborative whiteboard software, for example, allow multiple users to contribute to a digital whiteboard simultaneously. These whiteboard tools can be used during a standard video conferencing call by utilizing the screen sharing feature. While multiple tools may need to be used consecutively, teams can reap the benefits of real-time collaboration even if they are working on opposite sides of the world.  G2’s Collaboration & Productivity categories have hundreds of products that can assist users that are struggling to adapt to a digital workplace or are just looking for tools to enhance the hybrid experience.

G2’s data suggests users are highly satisfied with meeting management products. In G2’s Fall 2021 reports, reviewers gave meeting management products an average score of 91% for “meets requirements” and “product going in the right direction,” which were the lowest among G2’s “simple six” satisfaction ratings. Overall, products in the meeting management category had a “likelihood to recommend” score of 93% on average, suggesting that users are finding a lot of value in these tools. 

Below are the average scores for meeting management products over the past three quarters. All scores have remained consistently high across the six satisfaction categories outlined in the reports. In the Summer 2021 report, the scores either remained the same or increased slightly following Spring 2021. The same trend can be seen again in Fall 2021, resulting in consistent ratings across the satisfaction metrics, indicating that buyers are continuing to find value in their meeting management solutions.

Average satisfaction scores for products in the Meeting Management category across the last three quarters

These tools are already performing very well and will likely continue to have great potential for advancement as the needs of remote and hybrid teams evolve.

Meeting management software has the potential to shake up the boring and unproductive video meetings that have become the bane of existence for many. Collaboration combined with structure will help promote efficiency and might just make meetings more enjoyable. Investors are, without a doubt, showcasing confidence that these collaborative tools will bolster companies’ efforts to strengthen productivity in a post-pandemic workplace.

To read what real users think of hundreds of solutions for the workplace, whether in-person, virtual, or hybrid, visit G2’s Collaboration & Productivity categories.