Dutch startup Open Social raises €1.25m for service expansion

Amsterdam-based B2B SaaS platform for building online communities Open Social has raised €1.25 million investment from Peak Capital and Nimbus Ventures. With the seed investment round Open Social will further expand their team with top talent, develop exciting new technologies for their clients and bring their innovative open-source online community software to organizations around the world.

Open Social provides an innovative online community platform for organizations that want to bring their members together online, whether it is to organize global volunteering efforts, share and generate new knowledge, drive crowd-innovation or collaborate using a digital co-working space. Since its inception, Open Social has built award-winning online community platforms for some of the largest international organizations, including the United Nations and Greenpeace. 

Taco Potze, Founder and CEO at Open Social said: ''With the secured €1.25 million funding from Peak Capital and Nimbus Ventures, Open Social will further scale their services as an open-source SaaS-business to become a dominant player in the industry. In 2020, we have seen a technological evolution that would normally take two years, happen in the span of just two months.With increased decentralization of organizations comes concerns over privacy and data ownership. In this new area, our vision for an open web that inspires trusted connections and collaboration is more relevant than ever.''

Johan van Mil, Managing Partner at Peak Capital said: ''Peak Capital and Open Social built a strong relationship starting at a TNW Conference. Open Social has shown strong product-market-fit with its external community solution for NGOs. With their open-source technology and extension strategy they are able to tailor the platform to specific requirements of clients among different industries. We have been impressed by the commercial and technical capabilities of the team.''

Auke van den Hout, Managing partner at Nimbus Ventures emphasized: “The capability to service an international client base in Europe and the USA confirms the potential of Open Social.” 

With the investment, and the added-value of the new partnerships, Open Social will grow its core SaaS business and recruit top talent for its development team and senior positions such as a Head of Sales. This will allow Open Social to further develop their product offering, enter new markets in Europe and the USA, take customer success management to the next level and most importantly, drive its innovation roadmap.

Product and service innovation will firstly cover new developments in the core product. Such as: new APIs, scalable infrastructure and decoupling the platform’s front-end. With a newly expanded SaaS product team, there will also be a focus on developing a range of exciting new features and extensions such as real-time collaboration, chat, engagement automation, gamification and Office 365 integration.

Open Social is eager to benefit from the renowned insights and expertise of Peak Capital and Nimbus Ventures. Their guidance will ensure that Open Social grows and scales-up in a successful and sustainable manner. As Taco Potze says: “We feel very lucky to have found investors who share the same passion to deliver great products to clients, understand the drive, and ambition to discover new markets. The experience of these partners and their teams is of great value in our mission to become the world's leading community-building platform.”

www.getopensocial.com