Highlights:
- Firstbase brings a combination of hardware and software to help remotely based employees work remotely.
- The company plans to expand its employee strength to meet the demands from various companies.
Introduction:
It is very unlikely that the employees post pandemic will commute back and forth to reach work. It will be considered inefficient. Workers and employers are based on whether they would go back or work from home.
Covid-19 pandemic permanently changed the way the world works. And anyway, we are not going to pre-covid era.
Looking at this scenario Firstbase has come up with a solution. It is developing a hardware and a software solution to get remote workers the resources they need. Today a company announces the closing of a $13 million series A funding round. It has been led by Andreessen Horowitz.
Investors of series-A funding round for Firstbase:
B Capital Group and Alpaca VC also invested capital in the round. Firstbase did not start with its current product focus. It was born as something different which is generally the fact with startups.
The company was remote back in 2018 and originally had a Fintech bent. The experience was not very good according to Firstbase co-founder and CEO Chris Herd. It was difficult to acquire workers for the technology they required. Later on it was hard to get it back if they left the company.
As the effort with the fintech was low on time and capital, the company realized that it required internal tech it had built. This tech would support remote staff hardware and software requirements which may have broader application.
The company pivoted in late 2019. But by March 2020, the company had 600 companies on its waiting list. Since then the number is still multiplying. The product from Firstbase is two fold.
How the Firstbase product functions:
The software service helps companies monitor and manage their hardware assets. And remotely-based employees use these assets. It is a hardware service that can pre-install software on the hardware and can be sent to employees. This also offers remote IT support to the employees.
It is essential to observe that the customers can either use the software or both software and hardware in a combination. If the customer ops for a software only, they have to pay for the software according to SaaS.
How the company earns gross and net profit:
The company has two sources of gross margin. The software business generates software incomes and the company extracts gross profit from the hardware business. The hardware part of the startup appears nascent compared to its software counterpart.
The company started onboarding customers, last November making it a nascent startup that is still figuring things out. When asked what it cost to kit out a remote worker today, Herd said that the figure varied. It can be something in the range of $2000 and $5000.
The company plans to expand its employee strength:
He also adds that Firstbase will allow customers to pay those costs in the series of installments. Looking at its future, the ten person company wants to expand its staff by four or five times this year. First base intends to hew to its remote roots. This means that it won’t be looking for workers at a single geographic location.
Herd plans to focus on hiring staff for the sales department. The company plans to build more enterprise friendly software features with its new capital. This will allow them to target larger customers.
