As I wrote earlier this year, Deed‘s mission is a clearcut one: take the employee giving/charity/volunteer program that many big companies have, and make it better. Give it a proper home — one with a modern UI, built-in community management tools and that hooks into your workflow (read: Slack) so as to not be forgotten.
With that they were able to quickly get some big names on board, citing the likes of Airbnb, Stripe, Box and Adidas as customers quickly after launch. Now they’ve raised a $10 million Series A to keep the ball rolling.
Last week I hopped on a call with Deed co-founder Deevee Kashi, who stepped away from a conference he was speaking at to catch me up on what’s new with the company. He tells me that this latest round was led by Earlybird, and backed by PruVen Capital, Y Combinator and Paua Ventures, along with a few names that seem extra interesting from a strategic standpoint — like David Clarke (former CTO of the enterprise workplace management tool Workday), Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi and Jeffrey Katzenberg’s Wndrco.
One thing Kashi tells me about is an evolving focus for Deed right now: helping companies figure out what their employees really care about, and how to shape the company’s efforts — often wrapped up under a label of “Environmental, Social, and Governance” (or ESG) — accordingly.
“ESG investments are at record highs, right?” he says. “Companies are spending a lot of money, but they are not getting [employee] buy-in before doing so.”
“Our goal for Deed is really changing ESG, and the strategies around ESG, from ‘me’ to ‘we’.” he adds. “Really empowering employees to take action around causes they care about, thereby allowing companies to listen to and discover what their employees actually care about.”
Part of making that work, he says, will involve giving individual employees — not just those in charge of a company’s social impact team — more abilities to create and manage programs, fundraisers and volunteer campaigns. “[It’s about] empowering the employees themselves to manage the program for the company, as opposed to the companies managing the program for the employees.”
The other part, he notes, is building out their data team and finding ways to “measure and report on impact” in a clear, actionable way.
Before this, Deed had raised $2 million in a seed round in late 2020.