Fifty thousand dollars will only go so far. As the winner of last year’s TechCrunch50, that’s how much workgroup micro-messaging service Yammer received in prize money. But Yammer has now raised a $5 million series A financing from the Founders Fund and Charles River Ventures, according to founder David Sacks. Yammer is a spinoff from genealogy site Geni, which also just received another $5 million from the same investors in a series C financing.
The Founders Fund is a $220 million seed fund whose partners are mostly former execs from PayPal, where Sacks himself was the COO.
The A round should help Yammer make more inroads into companies big and small. Yammer is an enterprise version of Twitter that helps people in companies keep up with what everyone else is doing. It works especially well with far-flung employees (we use it every day at TechCrunch). But many competitors have already sprung up, including Present.ly and WizeHive. And Twitter itself could easily move into the enterprise market simply by launching a groups feature, as it has done in Japan.
While Twitter could replace a lot of these microblogging services, it’s becoming less likely by the day. I think they’re happy with the offering, and don’t want to extend it.
Well, except for a barely functional recommendation engine.
Congrats to the Geni crew on the release of Yammer. It’s all about Enterprise 2.0 this year and Yammer seems positioned well to capitalize. Keep up the great work!!
Boris
http://www.thewebwar.com/geni
I personally don’t believe Yammer will ever be a successful service. Anything to do with service geared toward corporate users require integration with other services in the company. Does users really want to login to 10 different applications to get 10 different services? I don’t think so.
Yammer is a neat idea but I don’t see it going too far as independent service. MircoBlogging in corporate world has to be a part of applications like Enterrpise Wiki kind of applications like SharePoint and Jira products.
yammer will never work in the workplace. simple – don’t even bother!
i work in the corporate workplace – will never work.
if anyone thinks otherwise – PROVE that you are correct, or at least some basis that there is a business model.
subscription WILL not WORK! so leave that alone – the people approving the service are not the ones approving the bills.
well, we’ve been using Yammer since September and it is now a must-have productivity tool to keep in touch with remote users.
what is the business model that will generate realistic cash flows for the business?
and just because TC50, doesn’t mean a real business. where IS the bus. model – seriously, keeps me up at night.
We started using Yammer at our office after they won TC50. A flurry of us signed up and we were all linked up together.
We used it for a few months before everyone found it quite useless and gave up on it. I don’t think Yammer is a viable tool for most offices. Most office people prefer to stick to email distribution lists and Wiki to post their work information.
I think the major reason that Yammer won’t work is because a majority of people at the same office or team need to be enthusiastic to use it.
I also think the constant updates of fluff and nonsense is a major turnoff. How do you moderate/block someone posting garbage, yet keep the productivity circle with them?
Yammer won’t work for business.
Techcrunch using a service barely qualifies a service as being promising. You guys are early adopters – not mainstream.
I believe Salesforce would probably disagree with your notion that subscriptions don’t work.
What you have to remember is that the business space isn’t just large corporate workplaces. There’s a huge number of SMBs that could clearly benefit from Yammer or another business-centric microblog. As a service, they don’t have to worry about the costs of installation and maintenance. And as a subscription, they pay for actual usage.
Even in large corporate workplaces, you can get a small workgroup using the tool. It doesn’t have to be an all or nothing scenario. Just put it on the corporate card. If it’s in your discretionary budget, great. And once it becomes a large enough cost that you’ll need approval, you’ll be able to back it up with actual productivity gains.
Did you just compare Yammer to Salesforce? *sigh*
That’s the brilliance of Yammers go-to-market strategy: groups organize naturally via company domain names and without the bean counters ever getting involved.
(linkback) Thrive or Fail? Yammer Raises $5 Million – Twitter for corporations [VOTE] – http://www.thri...rfail.com/ae73f
I know the secret to making this fly in the corporate world, but I am not telling … nyaaa nyaaa nyaaa
When the copy cat version of this copy cat service comes out with the secret, I will reference this post.
and I bet I’m going to beat you to putting it out there
maybe we should collaborate over twitter on this…
I was going to call mine yammerplus.com, but with you on board, we can probably leap straight to yammerplusplus.com
stop being spooky!
paypal mafia are at it again i see.
Great news for Yammer.
This works more for remote users, not anyone in the corporate setting. Didn’t really fly off in my company.
http://tinyurl.com/7uj5ay
BestJobsOnline
how about some reporting on why CRV has put money into yammer after they backed twitter. same partner even.
Our team adopted Yammer from day 1. We use it to coordinate foosball games and team lunches.
For real work coordination, we use multi-party IM, which just works fine…
Glad to see Yammer getting out there and making a name for themselves. I have yet to try it out in the workplace, but I have only heard of positive reviews.
wow … just shows
1) identify a service
2) clone it
3) rebrand it
4) raise funding
please write a post to reflect this
5) raise funding from same partner at same VC firm that backed service identified in #1
You forgot (5) Be well connected.
Solves everything, product’s merits become irrelevant.
Andy, any sucesfull application is copied at least 10 times within few months. Here in Czech Republic, we have 10 twitter clones and i believe that in each country it is similar.
That is the reason why i created http://www.applicopy.com marketplace.
I wonder what difference an open source Jaiku will make to the level of funding directed to Yammer, Identi.ca etc in the long term
Some large companies frown on hosted services. How long until there’s a version that can be installed behind the firewall, yet retain the functionality?
Congrats to Yammer. This is the year of Enterprise 2.0
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i’ve a big fan of yammer. We use it in our office in Sydney, Aust.
It’s a closed group version of twitter, so you dont get the annoying clutter of updates from external sources.
It’s allowed us to microblog and collaborate on meetings, how to use yammer, water-cool talk. Allows our office manager to keep tapped in to what’s happening.
We’ve also created subgroups for our account managers and now one for our basketball team.
The biggest advantage is that it reduces email clutter.
I think Yammer WILL work…but the adoption will start at smaller companies, then work itself up to larger groups.
As far as integration works, this has no relevance to ERP or sales automation systems… or any other legacy app for that matter. It’s about short and sweet communication, and for that it’s perfect and it doesn’t need to be “integrated”
Good work guys.
Hey Rob – Why do you not think it should be integrated? There is no value for you there?