Podio Goes San Francisco
Podio, a Copenhagen-based start-up, is about to officially open up their service to the public. As a build-up for the launch, Podio's team will be relocated to San Francisco between March 21st and 25th where they would host workshops, meetings and networking sessions. The website will be launched on March 24th. Podio has been reappearing in media's headlines ever since they came out of the stealth mode last September. Their mission is to change the way people work and what they offer to that end is a comprehensive enterprise software. Their platform includes all possible tools you might need for your work: from calendar to messaging to contact and task management and more. On top of that, users can easily build their own apps or use those built by others from Podio's appstore. Podio is free for small companies (up to 10 users) and chargers a subscription fee for larger enterprises. Even though the service has been operating on invite-only basis so far, they have managed to attract over 6000 companies, a couple of hundred of which are paying customers.
This February Podio closed a $4M Series A funding round from Sunstone Capital. Launching in US a meer month since that announcement seems like a natural move for the company to grow their business and expand their reach in the US market. Tommy Ahlers, CEO, said already in September that Podio would naturally need commercial offices close to the markets they want to enter. Six months later the company is opening a Podio Store in San Francisco - impressively fast execution.
Social networks for companies is a competitive space. On top of that, there are other service providers that offer excellent tools for a specific work process like CRM systems, contact and task managers, document and calendar collaboration tools, project management solutions etc. Podio's advantage is that it combines the plethora of work tools on one platform, which makes work processes simpler and faster. Besides, offering endless customization without making the service complicated and messy is a hard task that Podio has so far successfully pulled off.
How fast the userbase and the number of apps in Podio store grow once the service is open to public would be fascinating to watch. There is definitely a lot of potential in that space but acquiring new customers might prove to be hard and costly due to the number of similar solutions available on the market. Though with their current track record, Podio has a great starting point.
Hi Anna,
Thank you for your article. We're very happy to see how many diffrent projects and processes our users are using Podio for and we're looking forward to opening up Podio to everybody.
For anybody who is in the San Francisco area they are welcome to come by The Podio Store and additionally we have a lot of events next week. You can see more and sign up on: https://launch.podio.com/
Jesper (from Podio)