Mural takes a visual approach to collaboration, with a focus on “imagination” rather than knowledge work. To do this it relies on a digital whiteboard canvas that allows colleagues and clients to share ideas and brainstorming, even when they're remote.
It’s an approach that has led to swift growth for the company, which launched its app in 2011 and counts IBM – with tens of thousands of users – among its largest customers. Buoyed by the increase in remote working during the pandemic, the Buenos Aires and San Francisco-based Mural added more than a million active users during the second quarter of the year, and tripled its revenue.
On Tuesday, the company announced a $118 million Series B funding round led by venture capital firm Insight Partners, hedge fund Tiger Global, and various individual investors including former Microsoft SVP and HP COO Bill Veghte. Also involved is Slack, which has a fund aimed at investing in tools such as Mural that encourage a new way of working. (The latest investment follows from a smaller $23 million funding round in January.)
CEO and co-founder Mariano Suarez-Battan spoke to Computerworld about how the company is meeting enterprise needs during the pandemic, where it hopes to go, and what it’s like raising capital during a period of economic uncertainty.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Mural A lot of the discussion around team collaboration in recent years has centered around chat and video. How important is visual collaboration in creating a digital workplace that connects employees, and how does Mural enable this?
"In Maslow's hierarchy of needs, communication is super important. But as human beings, we're constantly imagining the future, constantly thinking, 'What if we change this, what if we change that?' And in the last 10 years, the popularization of visual techniques for collaboration has gone off like a rocket. And why is that?
"Well, first of all, when I tell you something, there’s a lot of know-how in my head that you're trying to understand in 30 minutes. There's a lot of backstory and so on, so everything that we can do to put it in a visual space is important. For presentation purposes, of course, you can do a PowerPoint or whatever it is – a short video. But when it comes to putting thoughts together, participating, contributing, we're seeing the urge, the need for all these people to do it with a whiteboard in place. ...They can all contribute their ideas, contribute their observations and bring in the diversity of the team into something that's tangible, something that persists, something that you yourself can react against, but also other people can react against.
"The technique around brainstorming is not that one person starts talking all the time, the more modern way is like, okay, there's a moment for everybody to post stuff, and then you share and then you add on top, and so forth. Having the possibility to transcribe the thing in your head into something that is visual, and you can react to and so on, it has shown to be super powerful. Design-thinking, agile, whiteboard, customer journey mapping: if you see the trends around all of those techniques, they're all becoming popular, regardless of the pandemic."
What impact has the pandemic and the increase in remote work had on adoption and use of Mural? How many monthly active users are there and how has that changed?
"It exploded. Around mid-March things rocketed; we’ve seen more than 10x increase in signups per day. It all accumulates. We saw a 3X increase in revenue and we are now 250 employees versus 100 – and aiming for over 300 for the year, which is a little nuts for only a few months. We accomplished the yearly goals - which were really ambitious - by June. We added over 1 million monthly active users worldwide, so it's a lot.
"The early majority [adopters] that were having to rush, being suddenly remote, they were not planning for this. Some were planning: IBM is a customer, they've been a customer forever, so they were ready to go. But even at a very big deployment, they doubled in terms of the use of people there.
"It's insane to see how the pandemic has forced people to accelerate their savviness with working remotely. And in particular, in this type of work, that is arguably one of the most important; strategizing, innovating, reflecting to learn - things that generally happen when we're brought together.
"For more task-driven solo work, we didn't get together. Working remotely on those it's much easier. When you're writing, your head's down, you are doing your thing. But when it comes to planning for the future and so forth, those are higher stakes, higher bandwidth types of collaboration, and those definitely need more attention and are easier to be done in person than remotely. But what we were finding out is that they can be done remotely. It'll be a little more deliberate, you need to pay more attention to the setting up of the workshop, you need to do some work in advance and not just show up.
"What we're seeing is that people are going from, “Oh damn, I need to do a two-day workshop on strategy next week how do I do it? Oh there’s this thing, we can set it up with video, chat, tasks and visual space.” But then afterwards they go through and say, we really didn't need to meet those 16 hours, we could have done it in half. They are learning, they're going from resilience to an increase in productivity because they're paying attention to meetings now. Meetings were a waste of time most of the time, at least 50% of the meeting.
"So what we're seeing right now is that people are designing meetings, they are spending the time to design meetings and they are templatizing meetings, so more people can take advantage of the work that others do in designing the meetings."
One of the challenges businesses face now is considering how to bring employees back to work – having some staff in the office and some who are working remotely. How is Mural able to help bridge these different working styles?
"Remote work is not new. We have people selling remotely all their lives and then developers and designers maybe working freelance from the beach. So it's not remote at the extreme of remote, it's about flexible work or mobile work.
"The office is a solution to a problem, which is that we need a place to get together and collaborate or work or get away from home. But the reality is that there are multiple ways you can solve the problem of innovation, collaboration, strategization and so forth.
"There's this guy from a very large a healthcare company, top 10 in the world, in the IT department. He said [that] before the pandemic he didn't believe that this kind of workshop could be done remotely. Later, he said they were able to do seven workshops instead of one by not having to travel and now they're seeing even more of a productivity increase because they are improving the pre-work, the post-work, the transcription is gone and so forth. Even in a moment where we can go back to whatever was before, I don't see that going away, because he already has all his stuff, all of the templates, and people have gone through a mastery of how to work digitally or remotely through the pandemic. And this is not over, we're seeing that the second wave is coming.
"People don’t want it to be over in some regard. The pandemic, yes, everyone's wants it to be gone. But the fact that they have flexibility in choosing where they can work: forget about it, that's here to stay, because they're going to be early adopters or more progressive companies that allow for that. You're seeing all of the ones that are making their announcements publicly right now and extending work from home forever. And it's not just Salesforce, Slack and Atlassian, it's also folks in financial services and folks in pharma. It's happening.
"Once you have the option as a great talent to go into [a business] that allows you to go flexible - with the same level of productivity, I’d argue - or not, it's going to be hard to not go with the one that allows for flexibility. Because forcing a solution - going to the office - that is not the right one to solve a problem.... If you write the piece in the middle of forest much better, go write the piece in the middle of the forest! If the companies go on an outcome-based goal setting, look for the outcome and not for controlling, [being in an office] makes no sense. Of course, the employee also has responsibilities, they need to show up; if you take advantage of the system, then it starts to fall. But I think that if people are smart adults, and especially in the knowledge worker or what we call the imagination worker type of people, it's a no-brainer. There is no coming back to what we had before."
You announced a $23 million Series A funding round in January and now you’ve announced a large Series B round. What was the reason for securing this latest funding and why at this stage in particular?
"Of course, we didn't need the money, as you mentioned. But here’s the thing: we believe that the time that people are defining how they work is now. People are paying attention this year around how to set it up for future years. So we decided that we needed to build more layers in the product to make it simpler to use for a less savvy audience. Features, integrations, but also content and [we] put together this learning experience program. When it comes to serving customers, it's insane the amount of demand that we still see. So we need to help them on board, we need to help with support, we need to help them scale up.
"We have programs for all that. But as I said before, those things are very artisanal in some ways, because it depends on the company, it depends on the individual. We want to have a lot of people in customer success, customer support globally, to be able to lean in and help people change because they are going through this in the context of a global pandemic, so they're super nervous, they don't have an option. There's a lot of tension in the world and we want to relieve some of that tension – and of course investing a lot in making sure that we can serve prospects, clients and scale lines, so there's like a go-to market.
"The last thing is, we are nothing in some regards without consultants. We need consulting partners to help people change how they work. And sometimes these consultants are inside the firms that we support, and sometimes they're external. So we are building a very big community of experts, facilitators, and innovators, fueled with content and expertise, that we're gathering together. ...So if you come into Mural and say, 'Hey I want to figure out how to do a better in-team chart,' they find the people that can help you coach your team through that. Or, 'I need to innovate, I need to strategize,' they can find templates that can guide you through that. But they can also, eventually, hire that person through our system. So it is a full solution for transformation, not just software.
"All of that takes a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of development, so that’s why we wanted the possibility to invest in all that. Of course, hiring takes time. But we're very fast, looking for talent, literally all over the world, mostly on the western hemisphere, because of time zones, but we're also staffing up in Asia Pacific.
"The other reason why is because the amount of amazing people that leaned in and then we chose Insight [Partners] and Tiger [Global], Slack invested and Ryan Smith and Bill Veghte – all these individuals and firms that expand our reach and expand our know-how. They help us not make the same mistakes and extend our networks. This is very important; it's about building a bigger company that lasts for a long time. So that’s the other reason: we didn't take the money from anyone, we were really diligent in picking the people that would help us take this company to the next level."
Compared to the earlier funding, the latest round was obviously carried out in quite different circumstance. What was your experience in securing funding during a pandemic at a time of economic uncertainty?
"There were two things. One is that it was it was great to go through this process [at that time] because we had all of the metrics going up and to the right. We executed really well in Q2. We also served our customers, we stepped up and my team worked their butts off. We even set up very ambitious goals, more ambitious goals for that quarter than we had previously. As I said, we achieved the yearly goals in June. Having a company that’s performing with a lot of demand in a category where nothing changed, it's just that we got compressed, it's not that we invented something new for the pandemic.
"The other thing is that fundraising remotely allowed me to do it really fast. If you were fundraising in the 'before world,' you had to drive to the VC room, pitch, get out, go to the next one. I was able to do a lot of these meetings using Zoom and Mural in a week, over 30 initial meetings in a week. That was excellent for me, because I had all these people competing with each other, in terms of the investors, and got the ones that decided to be the boldest in terms of the money offer and in terms of the extra services and support they would bring us. So as an entrepreneur it's beautiful because it gives you a more perfect market."