Raken has raised $10 million in Series A funding in a round led by prominent venture capital firm U.S. Venture Partners (USVP), with participation from investor Tao Capital Partners, and existing investors Eniac Ventures, Rincon Venture Partners and Spider Capital.
“Our mission has been to empower the construction field. We’ve helped construction companies on nearly 200,000 projects and the customer feedback has been incredible. Our partnership with USVP will allow us to accelerate product improvements, new features and maintain customer service,” says Kyle Slager, CEO and founder of Raken.
Raken boosts construction productivity, safety compliance and risk mitigation by providing a software platform that streamlines construction workflow processes such as daily reporting, time tracking and safety management. The company has more than 3,000 clients from all 50 states and 89 countries.
“More companies in the construction industry are embracing new technologies and Raken is at the forefront of that adoption when it comes to daily reporting, workforce time tracking and other field management solutions,” says Dafina Toncheva, partner at USVP. “Raken is positioned to take advantage of the $7B and software construction market. Raken is meeting the demand for technology integration in the construction industry and we’re excited to participate in their success.”
Raken is based in San Diego, where it has access to a growing pool of technology talent and an ecosystem for small business, with more than 25 business incubators and accelerators. According to CNBC’s Power City Index, San Diego County beats out Silicon Valley for return on investment in local public companies by 1.2 percent.
Raken prides itself on building solutions for their customers and has maintained near a 5-star rating in both iOS and Android App Stores since its initial launch in 2014. “At Raken, we do product feature testing and micro-pivoting to ensure we deliver customer satisfaction. We’re only successful if our customers are successful – our NPS score in the 70’s proves we’re doing that,” says Dr. Sergey Sundukovskiy, CTO/CPO and co-founder of Raken.
Raken’s business strategy to date has been intentional. “At Raken, we’ve focused on capital efficiency, and product-driven customer growth,” says Slager. “Our experiment-centric approach, business model and a focused product offering has allowed Raken to develop without incurring disproportionate business risk.”
“Our differentiation comes from our attention to the needs of our clients and delivering a product that they love,” Sundukovskiy adds. “The $10 million funding will be used to finance expansion of the existing product line for our customer base, while developing additional construction field management workflows. We will maintain our dedication to our existing customers with further investments in customer support many years into the future.”