Firstbase, a provider of remote infrastructure for global teams, today announced a $50 million Series B round led by Kleiner Perkins, bringing the company’s total funding raised to date to $65 million. Existing investors participating in the round include: Andreessen Horowitz, Alpaca VC, and Forum Ventures. Founded in late 2019 – just six months before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic – Firstbase’s business has rapidly scaled to address the sudden demand for companies to enable employees to do great work from anywhere. The fresh capital will continue to fuel the company’s aggressive hiring, product development, operations and geographic expansion.
Firstbase is building the Employee Experience Management (EXM) platform for modern work. This EXM platform provides remote infrastructure as a service, automating the onboarding and offboarding of employees and management and upgrades of all physical equipment. From laptops and monitors to ergonomic seating, connected exercise equipment and flattering lighting, businesses of all sizes rely on Firstbase to quickly and easily provide employees access to the tools they need. In addition to handling the deployment of assets, Firstbase manages IT installation and upgrades, ongoing repairs, culture and perks, as well as asset collection when a worker leaves.
“The Great Reset is underway for today’s workforce. The millions of people who left unfulfilling jobs are in search of new opportunities with greater flexibility,” said Chris Herd, Co-founder and CEO of Firstbase. “The ability to work remotely is no longer a perk, it’s a requirement, differentiating companies in recruiting and helping them retain and attract great employees. Going remote is broken. It’s expensive and time consuming and can lead to bad employee experiences. Businesses need to adjust everything from HR to IT to facilities to efficiently offer a seamless, enjoyable employee experience.”
Flexible Work is Here to Stay
In a recent Monster Intelligence Future of Work 2022 survey, 43% of employers think hybrid is the way of the future and 40% said flexible work options help them retain talent. Firstbase spoke with more than 3,000 companies and feedback noted the ability to hire the best talent for a role, regardless of location, as the most consistent benefit of offering remote work.
The Firstbase EXM platform centralizes and automates remote worker onboarding, shaving hours of time and thousands of dollars for every worker it services. The subscription-based process allows a company to create a unique catalog of available inventory where individual workers can select the equipment they need to do their job. The ability to design a work space with minimal distractions maximizes a sense of belonging and connectedness to colleagues, regardless of location. Dedicated space also provides greater clarity between work and home life, lines that became too blurred for many over the course of the pandemic. Once equipment is selected, every aspect of order fulfillment and delivery is outsourced and handled by Firstbase for seamless management of corporate assets.
“The past two years have shown the more than 255 million desk workers globally that work can be done from anywhere. For employers, the cross-functional logistics of supporting remote workers can be daunting: ordering, shipping, setting up, managing, securing, repairing and eventually collecting the physical assets to enable employees is a huge operational undertaking,” said Kleiner Perkins’ Josh Coyne, who was appointed to Firstbase’s Board of Directors. “Firstbase is defining a new category of remote employee experience management, which uniquely positions the team to help companies manage this difficult transition to a productive work-from-anywhere environment.”
Firstbase’s customer base has grown 7x year-over-year, driving a revenue increase of 16x since April 2021. The platform supports customers from early-stage startups to $40 billion publicly-listed global businesses. Its EXM software is currently in use managing tens of thousands of remote workers across the U.S. and Europe.
Firstbase was founded in 2019 by Herd and Trey Bastian. Prior experience in the U.S. Airforce and as an operations manager outfitting oil rigs in remote locations inspired the two to pair up to create Firstbase to help businesses overcome the obstacles of physical provisioning for remote workers. Today, the fully-remote team is made up of 50 employees, a 5x increase since the company announced its Series A funding in Spring 2021. Among the key leadership hires are Ian Cairns, Head of Product, a former director of product for Twitter’s developer platform, and Loic Houssier, VP of Engineering, who joins from Docusign, where he spent six years. Firstbase has plans to expand its workforce further, to double by the end of 2022.
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