Digital business raises £1.6m in seed funding
A business launched by two former Royal Marines has raised £1.6m in seed funding.
Loopin, an online platform that helps businesses measure and improve employee morale, has been backed by high-net worth individuals and angel investors.
Loopin’s mission is to boost the morale of one million employees by 2025 and with it, the performance of thousands of businesses.
The Bristol business currently has 40 paying customers including Reed, Farfetch and JD Sports.
The funding will enable the company to scale the platform as it moves from its highly-successful development stage to general availability.
Loopin was founded by former commandos Ben Williams and Antony Thompson.
After leaving the Armed Forces, Ben coached blue-chip brands, global tech companies and the England Football team on how to unlock ultra high-performance by building team morale.
Ben also wrote the 2020 best-seller The Commando Mindset, published by Penguin.
At the core of Loopin is the daily check-in via Slack or Microsoft Teams. Employees can quickly “loop in” their colleagues on how they’re feeling – sharing micro updates that keep teams feeling connected whether they’re in the office, remote or working hybrid.
Using natural language processing and predictive behavioural analytics, the Loopin platform gives businesses the real-time ability to measure, manage and forecast team morale.
The forthcoming early access version of the platform, which will be rolled out first to existing closed beta customers and waitlist, includes a brand new generative AI coaching feature.
Based on Ben’s coaching methodology and based on data, Loopin’s generative coach provides managers with actionable daily tips on how to better support their people, create cohesive teams and unlock a high-performance culture.
Simon Wingate, managing director at Reed said, “We take the engagement and wellbeing of our teams seriously and have a number of mechanisms to understand their experience. Most of these, however, are retrospective and what we lacked was a real-time measure of our teams’ mood and motivations.
“We use Loopin as a way of really understanding how our teams are feeling and to ensure we are driving a better quality of connection between managers and their direct reports. By giving people an opportunity to check in daily, we have a chance to get a real-time read of our teams, which we hope will be truly impactful to our employees’ experience.”
Ben Williams added: “As a former Royal Marine, I know first-hand that teams with high morale can accomplish the seemingly impossible.
“Coaching business leaders after leaving the Royal Marines, I was stunned to find that they had no way to measure and manage morale across the organisation in real-time. We built Loopin because morale is a metric that belongs on every board’s list of core KPIs. We’re excited to roll-out Early Access to help more companies that care about their people and their performance.”
