19.04.2019
At the end of March ActivTrak – a Texas-based provider of cloud Employee Activity Monitoring software – announced that it has succeeded in raising $20 million in series A funding (that’s first significant round of venture capital financing) from Elsewhere Partners, a growth-stage VC firm that invests mainly in B2B startups.
Nowadays the global employee monitoring market stands at $1,071 billion. Furthermore, it is expected to see a compound annual growth rate of more than 25%, led by a number of big players like Teramind, Hubstaff, VeriClock and Time Doctor.
Chris Pacitti of Elsewhere Partners pointed out, “ActivTrak has achieved considerable customer adoption with no outside capital and has the potential to become the mid-market leader for workforce analytics.”
Cofounder of ActivTrak Herb Axilrod said that the capital, which comes from sign-ups for the free and paid subscription services of the company, will be used to maintain the company’s office in Dallas and establish a headquarters in Austin, Texas.
He also added that both he and his cofounder Anton Seidler “were impressed with what Elsewhere Partners brought to the table with their team of operating advisors, deep experience in the software market, and access to talent that understood our business model and could provide the acceleration we sought for the company.”
Axilrod noted that ActivTrak delivers aggregated data and analytics that are able to “quantify” employee productivity. The software is installed to the desktops of employees in order to capture and record activity logs (including screenshots that are partially redacted for privacy reasons) during preset timeframes. These logs might include usernames, app title bars and website URLs. Other things like USB activity can be tracked as well. All this data gets transmitted to a web dashboard, where there is a table that displays the estimated web usage, app usage, and “productive” or “unproductive” time of the employees.
Newly appointed CEO of ActivTrak Rita Selwaggi emphasized, “ActivTrak sits at the tipping point of a tremendous market opportunity.”
ActivTrak’s software that you can host on in-house infrastructure or in the cloud on Amazon Web Services affords directors quite a lot of control over personal computers of their employees. Supervisors are able to block websites, create alarms to capture suspicious activity (like USB file transfers, IP address connections and website or app access), even monitor web and app traffic in real time. If an alarm is triggered, the supervisor gets a screenshot and email notification instantly and can configure the client to close offending apps and services automatically. Moreover, ActivTrak supports advanced SQL queries, so it enables custom reports with internal data sources. It can be integrated via webhooks into business intelligence software like Google Data Studio, Slack, Basecamp, Tableau, GitHub, Jira and Trello.