Breakout Startup PRO #27- Tandem
The Startup building tools for letting Remote Teams communicate more effectively
Hi,
This is Ankit here, we were on a break last week due to COVID-19 scare here back in India. I ended up shifting back to my place and I hope everyone here is doing fine as well. This was a crazy week and I hope it gets better in the coming days. In the meantime, please take care of yourself and 👏WASH👏YOUR👏HANDS👏.
Coming to the startup we discussing today, we are going to be talking about Tandem, a desktop app designed to give distributed teams the immediacy and flow of in-person communication.
About Tandem
Tandem was not the first project the team of Rajeev, Tim & Bernat worked on, in fact, the team first started working on Cryptagon, a portfolio management tool for Institutional Crypto investors.
In a conversation with Brianne Kimmel, Rajeev says, he wanted to work with the smartest people he knew and that led to the team working on from Cryptagon to Tandem.
Product
Tandem is one of a kind communication tool — replicating a virtual office for remote teams — that takes a decidedly different approach to other remote work apps on the market. It’s synchronous-first and replicates the feeling of a real office.
Some Unique things that Tandem enables:
Quick Collaboration
Spontaneous Conversations
Co-working
40+ Integrations with the tools with workplace tools such as Notion, VSCode
Cross-Platform
Traction
From the YC S19 batch which Tandem was a part of, it was one of the most sought after companies by the investors. In fact, the founders were gifted a Tandem Bike by one of the investors in the process…lol.
In the end, Tandem ended up raising a $7.5M seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz which valued the company in the north of $30M. The company was growing steadily till the recent very unfortunate COVID-19 outbreak which has accelerated the company’s growth exponentially. As more and more companies start shifting to a Remote Work policy to prevent Coronavirus, tools such as Tandem are seeing their adoption increasing day by day.
Here is how the “Google Trend” for the term “Remote Work” looks like:-
Tandem was one of the apps which saw a huge uptick in the user numbers due to this shift. In fact, the app went down yesterday.
Despite this, the company has become a Twitter favorite and is seeing “Superhuman” level fandom on Twitter right now.
In line with, Tandem has made its product available for free over the next few months. If you are an organization looking to adapt to Remote work, you can check it here.
They have also released a WFH Guide for Teams, highly recommend reading it here.
Even before reaching this breakout stage, Tandem was one of the companies which started making news early on.
Market Landscape
Tandem is one of the few products who have broken out in the competitive remote work tools space and it’s amazing to see how they have gone about building the product. In fact, rather than splitting their attention and spending three months of Y Combinator looking for investment and simultaneously building the product, they chose not to divide their attention and focus completely on talking to users & building a great product.
Instead, the team carved out a small window, as their time with Y Combinator was coming to a close, to build relationships with investors. Read more about it here.
At the time of its funding announcement in August, the company claimed to be growing 50% WoW. The rate clearly must have increased now with more teams moving remote every day. Some of Tandem’s users are:
Talking about competition, the company doesn’t have many direct competitors right now however a company such as Loom qualifies as a direct competitor but no one else even comes close to these two companies. It’d be interesting to see how this “battle” shapes up. I am rooting for both of them😀
However, we have to appreciate Tandem for the way they have gone about helping companies go remote.
Here’s one of the slides of Tandem’s pitch from YC Demo Day👇
Sounds pretty accurate in today’s times :)
Team
Rajiv Ayyanger- Founder & CEO, Tandem. Previously, Director of Product at Yakit, Product Manager at Delectable(acquired).
Tim Su- Founder & CTO, Tandem. Previously, held keys roles at Palantir & Yahoo and founded Astrid Inc.
Bernat Fortet Unanue- Founder & Design Lead, Tandem. Previously, Experience Designer at Yahoo, founded Aviate(acquired by Yahoo)
Funding
Tandem has raised a total of $7.7M in funding over 2 rounds.
The company raised a Seed Round of $7.5M led by Andreessen Horowitz.
Prior to that, the company had raised a $200K Pre-Seed Round.
Tandem was also a part of Y Combinator in 2019.