Call it an app-etite problem. Research says that large companies deploy an average of 163 different apps, and that companies of all sizes use an average of 88 apps, many of which are knowledge or communication apps for email, chat, collaboration, document management, customer services, and the like.
All those different apps create not just a knowledge-management problem, but, for legal departments, problems related to information governance, discovery and security.
All of which leads to news today of a $27 million Series B investment in Onna, a company whose product integrates all those disparate workplace apps, enabling companies of any size to unify, search, and protect the entirety of the organization’s knowledge.
This latest investment in the company, which has headquarters in New York and Barcelona, was led by Atomico with participation from Glynn Capital. Also participating were previous investors Dawn Capital, Nauta Capital and Slack Fund.
This brings the total investment in the company to $43 million.
I discussed the investment yesterday with Kelly Griswold, who is just today formally being announced as Onna’s chief strategy officer. She joins the company from contract management company Knowable, and she was formerly at Axiom, where she was vice president of partnerships and alliances.
Griswold told me that the company will use the investment to build its engineering, product and partnership teams in order to further expand its ecosystem of integrations and applications.
Onna’s focus is on integrating with knowledge-based apps such as G Suite, Slack, Salesforce, Dropbox, Confluence, Zendesk and Workplace, among others, and it describes its technology as a Knowledge Integration Platform, or KIP.
Not only does it allow search across and enterprise’s apps, but also it can be used for e-discovery, information governance, archiving, and compliance with data protection laws.
“Over the last number of years, the app ecosystem inside an enterprise has grown exponentially, especially with cloud-based applications,” Griswold told me. “And given what’s going on with remote working, we expect that number to grow even more.”
For companies, the challenge that creates is information silos and knowledge fragmentation, Griswold said. Onna crosses that chasm by creating a connected ecosystem of disparate apps, and then using machine learning and natural language processing to make the information within them available instantly.
“We think it’s inevitable that this challenge of knowledge fragmentation across the enterprise ecosystem is going to be solved,” Griswold said.
And by solving that problem of knowledge fragmentation, she said, she believes her company enables other companies to both unlock opportunities and mitigate risks.