Monday.com in the PCMag Startup Spotlight

These days, it seems we're all about teams in the workplace. All the trendiest offices work and socialize over Slack. They manage workflow over Asana. They build community over Workplace. These tools are making it easier than ever for teams to stay in communication, especially for those who work virtually. Indeed, there is no shortage of choices for those looking to collaborate, and the field is getting more crowded all the time. And yet, demand isn't waning; if anything team collaboration and project management is hotter than ever. That's a fortunate circumstance for Israeli startup, Monday.com, which is fast becoming one of the more notable players in the space.

CEO Roy Mann and CTO Eran Zinman founded Monday.com (formerly under the name "Dapulse") in 2012, before formally launching the platform two years later. When we sat down with them, Mann and Zinman said that they started the company with the goal of building a modular tool that fosters a culture of transparency and collaboration in the workplace. In July of this year, the company announced that it had raised $50 million in equity funding. With a unique approach to team management, it's clear that Monday.com wants to rule the collaboration space.

Company Dossier
CEO: Roy Mann
HQ: Tel Aviv, Israel
What They Do: Collaboration software
Business Model: Subscription-based
Current Status: Live, with millions of users and new features regularly added
Current Funding: $84.1 million
Next Steps: Increased focus on adding new features to the platform

Why It Works for Businesses

If you've used a collaboration or project management application before, you'll find Monday.com familiar. The platform shows users a single board on which they can view people and their related assignments. You can add teammates, assign tasks, and track assignments throughout the system. Like many platforms of this kind, it's designed to help you better understand your team and its workflows.

The cornerstone of Monday.com's design is the "pulse." From the board view, you can add a pulse, which can be an assignment, a project, a mission, or just a quick item on a to-do list. When you first make an account, you'll be asked to configure these fields as you like. You can drag and drop custom elements into the system. You can even add additional boards if you are managing a more complex workflow. There's also an optional "timeline" module, which lets you track incoming deadlines.

The company continues to add features to the platform. This month, Monday.com announced the addition of three new modules. These include what the company calls "The Column Center," which assists users in things such as time tracking and location views. Along with that, the company now offers Board Views, which add new visualizations, plus a community platform called Monday Stories, on which users can help each other solve problems and share ideas.

"What we really wanted to do was, rather than force users to work around the system, we wanted to build a platform that users in all verticals could build around their unique needs," said Mann about the company's design ethos. "We wanted to build a tool that people wanted to use — something that's fast, responsive, and looks good."

And that approach has evidently paid off. As of this writing, the platform already boasts more than 35,000 paying teams. The team counts some pretty big names in its user base: Companies such as Adidas, Samsung, Uber, and WeWork all use Monday.com for their teams.

"The ideal Monday.com user is anyone who manages or works on a team. We have teams of two people to teams of 2,000 using our platform around the world," Mann said. "We have learned so much from our users about the different ways Monday.com can be utilized. We recently counted over 200 business verticals finding success with our platform, from a huge variety of industries including manufacturing, consulting, higher education, and finance." He also pointed out that more than 70 percent of Monday.com users come from nontechnical verticals.

Inside the Platform

Both Mann and Zinman have backgrounds that lend themselves well to building this kind of platform. Mann started his career as a web developer and eventually worked in different leadership positions until he was the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Wix ($14 Per Month for Combo Plan at Wix) , the popular website builder. Zinman was Manager of R&D at Conduit, a company that helps businesses manage mobile apps. When they founded Monday.com in 2012, it originally went by the name "Dapulse." To say the original name wasn't popular would be an understatement, as the name was mocked by employees and the media alike. The company even released a tongue-in-cheek video, in which they poke a bit of fun at themselves. The video also touts the new name Monday.com as a name "people will remember…a name that people can spell," says one cheerful employee in the video. Considering how successful the platform has been since this name change in fall of 2017, the company views it as a successful move.

But when we sat down with the co-founders, it was clear they want to be known for their technology and approach rather than their original naming blunder. Part of this pride comes from the underlying tech that helps them power the platform. This is an internal business intelligence (BI) tool they have given the name "BigBrain."

"As a company, we're obsessed with metrics and data. When we were first starting out, we couldn't find a BI tool that suited our needs so we built our own, now fondly called BigBrain," Mann said. "BigBrain tracks every metric we rely on, from every dollar spent to every interaction with the platform.

Large dashboards around Monday.com's offices broadcast metrics that indicate where the business stands from moment to moment. "It helps us run A/B tests and determine how our marketing budget is best spent," Mann said. "We would certainly consider BigBrain a major technological accomplishment of ours and absolutely essential to our success."

Mann and Zinman are proud of their continual improvements to the platform. "We've worked really hard recently on the overall speed and performance of the platform, and making sure it could seamlessly handle our dramatically growing user base as we scale," Zinman said. "We invested a lot of resources into our mobile app and ensured that the boards, which are the essential collaboration structure of Monday.com, remained flexible, customizable, and always updated in real time across browsers and the app."

As far as what the future holds for Monday.com, the co-founders said their main focus is on building out and improving the product. "We want to keep building a tool that works for our users rather than our users having to work for it," said Zinman. "We launched three new major offerings in conjunction with this funding round that are super exciting, and there's so much more we want to do."

Investor's Perspective

The $50 million in funding made more than a few headlines in the tech world when it was announced this month. We thought this was interesting for a few reasons. After all, collaboration is crowded field and established players such as Asana and Slack are already in the mix. PCMag Labs tested Monday.com and generally liked it, but we found a lot of similarities to competitors. which brought up the question of why it's such a venture capital (VC) darling. To find out, we sat down with one of Monday.com's key investors.

Paul Szurek is Vice President at Insight Venture Partners, a VC firm based in New York City. While it was Stripes that was responsible for the most recent round of funding, Insight Venture Partners has been supporting Monday.com for years and was excited about the opportunities afforded to the company by the funding. When we asked Szurek what Insight Venture Partners sees in the company, he said that it was its broad range of use cases and supported vertical markets that make Monday.com a winner.

"We met Monday.com two years ago and saw the market opportunity. It's a crowded field, but we hadn't seen anyone nail the user-friendliness that Monday.com had achieved," Szurek said. "The fact that you can build it around your company's unique needs makes it stand out in the space. It applies to most industries, and that's what we really liked about it." When we asked him about what the future holds for Monday.com, Szurek sounded pleased with the company's plans to focus on building. "I think what you'll see them do is continue to add features, like the ones they've introduced recently," Szurek said. "I think you'll see them work harder on tailoring the platform to certain use cases."