Could this meeting have been an email?
This is a question a lot of us have been asking ourselves over the last 18 months. If we weren’t familiar with the terms async, hybrid and remote before, we most certainly are now. When the Covid-19 pandemic forced most people to rethink ways of working and how best to collaborate online and, in many cases, with people we’d never met in person before, with it came a slew of new tools and products promising to ease the transition into remote work. At this point, colleagues Haroun Hickman and Joel Kang found themselves in meeting after meeting. Their complementary skill sets meant that one would require the other for constant, but never sufficient, support.
Like most great ideas, Dala was born out of a genuine need and pain point experienced by Haroun and Joel. Their conversations around how difficult it was to constantly stay up to date with all the micro details and changes that happen on a daily basis quickly turned into a more philosophical question: why do we need meetings at all? People are in meetings typically to gain and share context; context that is missing because knowledge is fragmented, people are distributed, and communication is hard. This conversation is something many companies have been grappling and trying to solve for including the likes of fellow portfolio company, tl;dv.
As we experience a shift in market dynamics with greater power in the hands of employees who are choosing to work in organisations that best align with their own mission and whose ways of working better suit the lifestyles people want to lead, we believe there’s a huge opportunity in Dala. Haroun and Joel are setting out to improve people’s overall quality of work, enable stronger conviction in their company’s mission, and increase overall happiness.
We are delighted to lead Dala’s $1.4M pre-seed round alongside fellow members of the Seedcamp Nation including Hopin CEO, Johnny Boufarhat. On the investment our Partner, Tom Wilson, comments:
“Organisations are fantastic at creating meaningful and rich information for internal purposes. However, finding the right piece of such information at the right time is notoriously challenging. Dala solves this problem with their intelligent search tool. It allows companies to continue to use best in class solutions to create content (i.e. G Suite, Notion etc.) and communicate (i.e. Slack etc.) whilst Dala connects the dots between this information to save companies time and money. We’re delighted to be backing Haroun and Joel in bringing this vision to life.”
Read the full story behind Dala in Haroun and Joel’s own words right here. We’re excited to be mission partners on this journey with you!