Employees come and go, often taking their knowledge with them. There are also times when just a handful of employees know how to do something and don’t have time to provide a mass tutorial. That’s where Scribe comes in. Its software records movement and clicks and converts them into a step-by-step guide in less than a minute with screenshots and text that is editable and shareable. The information can be recorded from a Chrome extension or desktop app and also live in a repository until it is needed.
Today, the company launched with $30 million in venture capital, including a new $22 million round of Series A funding that was led by Tiger Global Management. A group of existing investors also participated in the investment, including Amplify Partners, which led Scribe’s $8 million seed round at the beginning of 2021, Haystack Ventures, XYZ Venture Capital, AME Cloud Ventures, Morado Ventures and SEV.
Co-founder and CEO Jennifer Smith, formerly of McKinsey & Company and Greylock Partners, formed the San Francisco-based company a couple of years ago with entrepreneur and former Google engineer Aaron Podolny after seeing a knowledge gap in how operational work was done.
Smith’s background is in organization and operations work. She talked to more than 1,200 founders about how software was bought and sold, and what they wished existed — and learned that not much had changed in this area in a decade.
“The process is still being done manually,” she told TechCrunch. “There is not a standard way to communicate how to do something. With Scribe, it is a standard. You can click the record button, do the task and it auto generates step-by-step instructions.”
Scribe has been heads-down since it was founded, but the software is now being used by over 10,000 organizations globally as a way to share with others how to do something. These include use cases by organizations outside of those initially targeted by Smith and Podolny, like governments and schools.
In addition to the investors mentioned earlier, angel investors involved include former Microsoft chairman John Thompson, Adobe chief product officer Scott Belsky, Gainsight CEO Nick Mehta and Opendoor CEO Eric Wu. As part of the investment, Amplify Partners general partner Mike Dauber joins Scribe’s board of directors.
Scribe is the latest company to attract venture capital for efforts to capture and share digital processes. For example, in August, Tango raised $5.7 million for its Chrome extension that auto-captures workflow best practices so that teams can learn from their top performers.
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Ross Fubini, managing director of XYZ, said Scribe was building a company that makes something complex look easy. He credits Smith for helping many marquee startups ramp up their enterprise selling during her time at Greylock and believes that she and her team are creating a product that is doing the same: showing them how to do their job better.
“And companies will pay for that,” he added. “This is just the first part of the journey. When we talk to companies describing problems on creating documentation, we see that bottom-up part. We are here to put in yet more money into the company so that Jennifer and her team can keep doing the work, build the go-to-market and get paid for that value.”
Meanwhile, Scribe has both a free version and pro/enterprise plans, and averages nearly 50% reduction in non-productive time spent learning how to do a process.
Smith intends to use the new funding to scale the team to respond to customer demand that is coming from startups all the way to Fortune 500 companies. The company’s 20-person employee base is a majority of women and underrepresented minorities, something Smith is proud of as she focuses on building an inclusive, culture- and talent-first organization, she added. She will also invest in R&D and product development that is coming down the pipeline.
“We want Scribe to be the new common standard for sharing how to do something,” Smith added. “We take inspiration from Zoom and Slack, which have both become standard and lexicon. It’s really about driving that reach and distribution with colleagues and customers.”
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