$3M seed round to bring to life the platform all community-led organizations are missing

We are thrilled to welcome a few newcomers around our cap table: Isai, Ankaa Ventures, SaaS Partners, Kima and Notus Technologies. We’re humbled by their trust and looking forward to putting it to good use with our customers and partners.

This sizeable round of funding is a major stepping stone on our mission to build up a European leader in Community-Led-Growth and keep developing our best-in-class community platform.

This milestone is also an opportunity to reflect upon the past few years and explain in more detail what lies at the core of our mission.

Why are we raising funds?

Online communities are becoming central to all organisations

The story of MeltingSpot starts in June 2020. As our founding team was actively working on a separate project (an AI sourcing platform called Askeet), we had an epiphany 😜.

As the world was going through lockdowns, the usage of video (and more specifically visio-conferencing) started changing rapidly the way organisations worked, purchased, recruited, managed… Online communication is booming, strong and fast. The creator economy is developing. Web 3 and DAOs are taking over. All these trends are spurring the emergence of online communities and ecosystems.

At the same time, companies are looking out for new ways to interact with their teams and clients online, as traditional channels are getting increasingly crowded and costly. Webinars are no longer attracting audiences, managing a company page on LinkedIn is proving ever more complex, so is keeping your Instagram audience actively engaged…

As a consequence, organisations are doubling down on communities to grow. We are seeing the emergence of a brand new growth strategy already famously dubbed “Community Led Growth” (a marketing strategy consisting in placing communities at the forefront of product and business development).

One year into our journey, we already hold one thing for certain: there is much more to online communities than mere audiences. While nothing beats social media to grow audiences, there is next to no solution for companies to host their communities. That’s why we set out to build the best community platform to help organisations build, grow and engage their communities of clients, prospects, end users, partners, investors…

As firm believers, we launched our own community around Community-Led-Growth to spread the word and help companies get started with their own communities : https://go.meltingspot.io/spot/129487c9-6acc-43d9-ab96-182ded763538.

Offering an alternative (or complementing) social media marketing

Considering the tremendous potential, we decided to pause Askeet early 2021 and dedicate 100% of our time to the development of MeltingSpot.

MeltingSpot will become a leading community platform, with live video at the core of its feature set.

Companies who’ve started growing and managing online communities use an average of 13 different tools, making the experience for their members particularly complicated. MeltingSpot shall make everyone’s life a lot simpler by centralising community essentials in one single place (live video, discussion forums, on-demand content, direct messaging…).

Our first step on our Product journey was to develop and bring to market an online event platform to address a growing need among our existing customers and prospects to host webinars and online conferences during the pandemic.

But from the get go, we new online events would only be one piece in the puzzle: live moments were part of broader community engagement process that we set out to simplify with a dedicated platform.

Creating and growing online communities is one of the most effective marketing levers for a brand today. Whether it's to acquire new customers, co-construct a product or position yourself as an opinion leader on a given subject, companies are all called upon to create and engage their online communities.

Many companies have tried to engage these communities on social media (mostly on LinkedIn), in vain. Social networks are incredibly powerful to grow awareness. But they fall short when it comes to actually engaging people and building communities of like-minded professionals. MeltingSpot has been designed to fill this gap between social media and your sales funnel.

Any community, made simple.

With just a few clicks, MeltingSpot lets community builders organize and host all types of lives and events, from basic workshops or meetups through to formal webinars or large online conferences. Discussion channels and collections make it possible to share on-demand content and extend interactions over time, in an asynchronous way.

And the platform has more than one tool under its belt, including a ground breaking content sharing feature. Whilst most companies join MeltingSpot to offer their members a safe place to meet and interact, far from the noise and opaque algorithms of social media, they are also seduced by the ability to build bridges between communities, and publish their own content (live or on-demand) to other Spots.

LinkedIn created concept of “connection request”. MeltingSpot is bringing to market “streaming request”.

This social twist is particularly appealing to companies willing to join the Community-Led-Growth revolution. After years of Sales-Led and Product-Led, Community-Led is coming home, strong and fast! At a time when the economic outlook is forcing companies to challenge their marketing strategy and find new acquisition channels, we bet this new concept will resonate with a growing number of companies around the world.

A fundraising to build the next European leader

It is in this context that we have decided to raise $3M from Ankaa Ventures, ISAI, SaaS Partners, Kima Ventures and Notus Technologies, associated with a few business angels accustomed to seed capital operations in the tech industry (Thibaud Elziere, Julien Romanetto, Alexandre Crosby...).

Thanks to this fundraise, we plan on pursuing the development of our platform, multiplying its integrations with other tools used by our customers (CRM, marketing automation platform), and strengthen our team and preempt booming European markets. For those who are interested, please take a look at our roadmap: https://roadmap.meltingspot.io/tabs/1-under-consideration.

We firmly believe that an alternative to social networks is possible, especially in B2B markets. We are thrilled to work closely with our new financial partners, and especially with you, companies of all sizes, creators, associations, networks, unions... with all of you who wish to take care and boost your communities!

Care to share your feedback? To test MeltingSpot or get started, it's easy click here 👉 https://go.meltingspot.io/.