"MURAL Raises $23M to Reimagine Visual Collaboration 🚀"
Below is an article originally written by Mariano Suarez-Battan, Co-Founder & CEO at PowerToFly Partner MURAL, and published on January 27, 2020. Go to MURAL's page on PowerToFly to see their open positions and learn more.
Today we announced a $23M Series A round of funding led by Radian Capital, and quickly followed by Endeavor Catalyst and Gradient Ventures. Thank you Weston, Darian, and your teams. You truly understand our vision (you're also our power users!) and want to help us achieve it.
Thanks to our members 🙏
To our early adopters, investors and partners, thank you for being our champions on this journey. Thank you for being part of this passionate community and for your contribution to making MURAL the leading player in design thinking and visual collaboration in the enterprise space.
You have been using MURAL to solve important problems, just like Pearson and GitHub. You have been scaling a culture of innovation, like IBM and USAA, improving your productivity, reducing travel costs for in-person meetings and changing the way you engage with your teams and clients.
You kept us true to our core and helped us continually improve the experience to what it's become today. We are just getting started and have ambitious goals to transform how we work.
Please continue to spread the word to people who are learning the power of visual collaboration and seeing the future of remote work.
Thanks to our partners 🙏
LUMA Institute, Jeff Gothelf, IBM Design, Jeanne Liedtka, David Bland, IDEO, Robert Skrobe, Erik Flowers and Megan Miller, AJ&Smart, XPLANE, Voltage Control, Etch Sprints, Territory, Jay Melone, Daniel Stillman, and Google Sprint. You dramatically improved the client experience by bringing your know-how, methodologies, frameworks and templates into the product. There are thousands of innovation consultants, design experts, facilitators and coaches like you in our network, who are deeply committed to fostering creative innovation and work transformation. Thank you Tim Brown for introducing me to Phil Gilbert and igniting our enterprise journey. There are many more of you we still need to thank.
Thanks to our team 🙏
There are currently over one hundred Muralists working across six time zones. You and many others have contributed to our success along the way and brought your full selves to work everyday. What started as an insight while working on a video game about emotions, has now turned into a passionate visual collaboration community who regularly express how fun and easy it is to engage with their teams. We have you to thank.
Thank you Pato and Agus for always being there. You are true friends and dedicated co-founders. Thank you Cele, Guido and Juli for jumping in early on and staying with us. Thank you Jim for being a guiding star in building a world-class customer success team.
And most recently Kap (aka Greg Kaplan), who came over from IBM after seeing the impact of MURAL on its business, and who will now help us dramatically improve how we serve our customers and work together with partners.
Why is this important to you? 🤔🤖
Artificial intelligence is coming for our jobs – especially jobs done by knowledge workers. And that's ok! Intelligent machines are faster and more accurate at a lot of repetitive tasks, and some automated help can be good. However, it's imagination work that makes us human.
Imagination comes first, before creativity. It's about envisioning what's possible, then going and making it happen as teams, and as people. Spending more time on imagination work will help us focus on a better future. Visualizing what's possible will allow us as humans to be able to have a better dialog and ultimately achieve more together.
- We believe anybody with a brain is an imagination worker.
- We believe guided methods and facilitators help teams achieve more.
- We believe work can happen anywhere and the best ideas can come from the most quiet person in the back of the room.
There are one million people out there just like you – visual thinkers, collaborators, leaders, and facilitators – who want to change the world in big and small ways. Now it's our job to find them and their teams, to fulfill our mission to connect the global distributed workforce and support enterprise brands in their cultural transformations.
What's next? 🕵️
We can't wait to show you what we're working on!
We already have a great team and culture, but we're looking to grow. By the end of 2020, we're looking to double our size. We'll keep bringing people on board that care about our mission to power up imagination workers globally.
We have an internal goal of improving how we work so we can showcase best practices in visual and remote collaboration across teams and geographies.
We'll be expanding our product team in Buenos Aires, the Bay Area, and remote locations, as well as our sales team based in the U.S., Europe, and expanding into APAC. If you are passionate about design thinking, remote work, and helping humans achieve through imagination, say hello: https://mural.co/jobs
- Faster and better core product.
You already love the simplicity and fun of working in MURAL. We want to keep that and make the platform run faster, to help you achieve your outcomes faster.
You will also get help from the platform and team to prepare, run and wrap up workshops and meetings. Our head of customer experience, Jim Kalbach, literally wrote the book on how to provide customers with real value — it's the core of what we do.
- Integrated community.
Our clients hire MURAL to drive their culture transformations, enable their teams to work more efficiently and make faster decisions, and reduce travel costs for in-person meetings. That doesn't just happen with software. Coaches, facilitators, and specialists need to collaborate with different teams and get the most out of them. Internal and external consultants are catalysts and shepherds of that change and we want to become a place where they can showcase their work, in addition to delivering great service.
We will also continue to support our education program, offering free, unlimited access to students, educators or instructors — or anyone who is preparing future generations of imagination workers.
- Double down on enterprise readiness.
We serve 40 percent of the Fortune 100, and many more great enterprises. We support thousands of members across our largest clients (tens of thousands at IBM alone!). We have been SOC2 compliant for five years, but we are just getting started!
Our approach to helping large firms will evolve with more solution selling. Our learning services will be unleashed after a period of beta testing. We will continue to focus on the most pressing needs of our enterprise customers as they continue to hire us to solve important problems.
Thank you again!
Now back to work 😜
P.S. If you're as excited about this news as we are, consider sharing it with your network 📈
Lead Together: Behind the Scenes of Facebook's Women@ Leadership Day
Tatiana L. is a global client partner based in Miami.
Tatiana is part of the Women@ Facebook Resource Group and helped plan Women's Leadership Day, an annual global community summit. While the highly-anticipated event takes place over just one day, its massive impact is felt over the course of the entire year.
Amy W. is an operations lead based in London.
"Women's Leadership Day is more than an event. It's energy, and it's a movement," Amy W., an operations lead in London, says. "Moments like this can completely change the perception of women in technology."
From choosing the content and programming for the event to making it accessible for women around the globe, we went behind the scenes with seven members of the Women@ Facebook Resource Group to learn more about how women are empowered—and are empowering one another— in their career journeys at the Facebook company.
Behind the scenes with Women@
Amanda M., an internal recruiting manager based in Singapore, speaking onstage at 2019 Women@ Leadership Day in APAC.
"I've always been passionate about empowering women, but I didn't know how I could do it at work. My first Women@ experience changed how I felt at Facebook," Amanda M., an internal recruiting manager in Singapore, remembers. "From then on, I wanted to help other women feel heard, valued, and confident."
Planning the global event, which brings together women from more than 20 countries, calls for close collaboration across multiple teams, regions, and timezones. Members of Women@ also partner with other Facebook Resource Groups, such as the Pride@ Resource Group, Latin@ Facebook Resource Group, Desis@ Facebook Resource Group and Black@ Resource Group, to ensure all women at Facebook are represented and feel included.
Vivian V. is a program manager based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
"Across regions and communities, we each bring unique differences and powerful stories. When one of us moves forward, we have the opportunity to bring all of us forward," Vivian V., a program manager in the San Francisco Bay Area explains. "While planning the summit, we meet weekly to talk about what women in different regions are experiencing. From the event theme and content to planning speaker sessions and fine-tuning details, we each have items to own. Two months before the summit, we meet daily to share updates and make sure nothing slips through the cracks."
"Just like me, women in APAC look forward to Women's Leadership Day all year long," Amanda says. Planning something that's deeply meaningful to so many people can feel like a lot of pressure, but at the same time, it's uplifting. I appreciate that we have the opportunity to talk about our individual and shared challenges, and we map out ways we can build community while empowering leadership for women across the globe."
Empowering confidence, equality, and leadership through storytelling
Paris Z., a vertical strategy lead in Singapore, and Amanda M. collaborate with women across the globe to plan Women@ programming and events.
Women's Leadership Day encourages women to talk about challenges like experiencing imposter syndrome, breaking through barriers, and how to manage work/life flexibility. "Storytelling is a huge part of the event," Paris Z., a vertical strategy lead in Singapore, explains.
Vivian says, "I've been at Facebook for nearly two years and help plan these events, and honestly, I never really understood imposter syndrome before I got here. Working with the Women@ community and hearing from our speakers—who are talented, brilliant superstars—I've seen firsthand how it affects them too."
Michelle C. is a client partner based in London.
Michelle C., a client partner in London, says that the summit's speaker sessions, which feature people from inside and outside of Facebook, are a highlight of every event. "We had a speaker from Tel Aviv who talked about the importance of balance in her personal life and how she co-parents with her husband. She shared specific things she's done, like adding her husband to the WhatsApp chat groups for mothers she's in and reminding her daughter's school that her husband is also available when their child feels sick. Her message was that we'll never be equal in the workplace until we're equal at home, and it really struck a chord."
Paris says that in APAC, Eva Chen's talk about facing challenges amidst the coronavirus pandemic and how she's raising her daughter was a top-rated session because it was so relatable. "From talking about her daughter's love for dinosaurs—a "boy" thing—and raising kids to fully be themselves to opening up about what it was like to grow up with immigrant parents from China and Vietnam, Eva inspired us with her authenticity and openness. Her struggle to feel supported while working in fashion and tech, rather than medicine, is something a lot of people in APAC understand."
"Every woman has a unique story," Michelle says. "Hearing from others is inspiring, validating, and truly eye-opening. It reminds us that we're not alone."
A memorable and lasting impact
It's no surprise that with the tremendous amount of planning and careful consideration that goes into the summit, its full impact is impossible to measure.
"It meant so much to me when people shared such positive feedback about Women's Leadership Day," Paris says. "We heard that some attendees felt inspired for days and weeks."
Kira G. is an agency partner based in Berlin.
Kira G., an agency partner in Berlin, has witnessed how the summit's programming can inspire action, even helping people push past a career plateau. "We might reach a point in our careers when we think, "I can't do this anymore, I'm not moving forward'," she says. "Women's Leadership Day gives us fresh perspectives, shows us new approaches, and starts important conversations. This can unlock new paths for growth and help us move forward."
Impact is felt in other Facebook groups, communities, and across teams too, inspiring interest and allyship. Amanda explains, "I felt so proud when a male VP from the Sales team came to us after hearing about what people talked about at Women's Leadership Day. He told us he wanted to learn more because it's everyone's responsibility to be an ally."
Empowering the community throughout the year
While Amanda describes Women's Leadership Day as a "bump in energy and inspiration" and "an injection of adrenaline", Vivian says that the real magic is what happens afterwards—and takes place all year long.
"When we think about Women's Leadership Day, our focus is on making sure that the powerful messages we hear and experience serve us throughout the entire year. We ask ourselves questions like, "How can we sprinkle these themes into our programming throughout the month or quarter? How do these ideas fit with our Women@ initiatives?" Going through something awesome together is just the beginning. Our work takes place year-round and we're constantly building on it to do more."
Paris agrees: "There's no shortage of amazing stories from our Women@ community throughout the year. Women's Leadership Day is just one channel for those stories, and I love how it stays top of mind with people and empowers them to do more good. When we come together, we can do anything we dream of."
"We're building a sisterhood and a community," Tatiana beams. "It feels so good to know there's always someone there to support you."
Learn more about Facebook's Employee Resource Groups, including Women@ here.
