Fellow.app Announces $6.5 Million in Seed Funding and Shopify as First Customer

Today is a special day for the Fellow.app team. We’re announcing a $6.5 million USD seed round— which will help us continue building an amazing product for managers and their teams.

The seed round was backed by Inovia Capital, Felicis Ventures (an early backer of Shopify), Garage Capital, and a series of prominent angel investors. 

We’d like to thank Darrell Etherington, Sean Silcoff, Polina Marinova, Yuliya Chernova, Isabelle Kirkwood, Murad Hemmadi, Jim Bagnall, and Craig Lord for covering this important announcement:

• TechCrunch: Fellow raises $6.5M to help make managers better at leading teams and people.
• Globe and Mail: Shopify-boosted meeting-management startup Fellow raises $6.5 million.
• Fortune Term Sheet: Fellow, a startup building software for managers, raised $6.5 million in seed funding.
• WSJ Pro Venture Capital: Fellow.app, a Canada-based provider of a tool connecting managers with their teams, was seeded with a $6.5 million investment.
• Betakit: Fellow.app closes $8.58 million CAD to scale co-pilot tool for managers.
• The Logic: Shopify’s favourite HR startup Fellow.app exits stealth mode, raises $8.75 million CAD.
• Ottawa Citizen: The Shopify effect: Startup Fellow.app raises $8.75M on strength of tech giant’s validation.

This milestone wouldn’t have been possible without our beta users’ feedback and support.

Our beta period started with 200 Shopify employees, who provided the feedback necessary to build a truly compelling product. Now, tens of thousands of employees at Shopify and other forward-thinking companies such as Vidyard, Tulip Retail, and North use Fellow.app to manage their work interactions.

According to Brittany Forsyth, Shopify’s Chief Talent Officer, Fellow.app has helped the organization promote a growth-mindset and better relationships between managers and their teammates:

“Fellow has been a game-changer for us,” said Brittany Forsyth, Shopify’s Chief Talent Officer. “It intuitively builds into my day-to-day rhythm, and the natural flow of Shopify, making it so much simpler to have valuable conversations. Thanks to Fellow, those conversations are now more ongoing and focused around true growth and increasing performance.”

What our investors have to say…

Karamdeep Nijjar, partner at Inovia Capital: “We believe that managers are the highest point of leverage for companies today. For far too long companies have ignored manager training and productivity tools. We think Fellow is poised to capture this up-and-coming market.” 

Aydin Senkut, founder and managing partner at Felicis Ventures: “We fell in love with the product that the team was building — how lightweight and easy to use it was and the fact that there finally was a great product built for managers.” 

About Fellow.app

Fellow.app is the world’s first software solution specifically built to help managers and their teams power their internal relationships and 1-on-1 meetings in a single, intuitive cloud-based tool. The company was founded by the co-founders of Fluidware (acquired by SurveyMonkey in 2014) and is on a mission to help every manager become a great leader.

Check out our press release for more information!