Mac Reddin, the co-founder and CEO of Commsor, met the first professional investor for his company’s $16 million Series A on Lunch Club, a marketplace for 1:1 video introductions. Commsor, which sees itself as an operating system for community managers, then experienced first-hand the benefit of matching people within similar industries in an engaging, online setting.
It’s thus quite fitting that, months later, Commsor is adding a company to its tech stack that is focused on private networking within communities. Commsor has scooped up Meetsy, a startup that helps people within communities facilitate creative and spontaneous conversations with each other. Meetsy, a fully-bootstrapped business, was founded by Bradley Tramer and sold for an undisclosed price.
Commsor launched months ago to be the solution that helps community managers prove that they’re not wasting the budget and their work is tied to real, valuable outcomes. Commsor could pull an insight like, “Here are three Google engineers that are using your [insert community platform name here]. so maybe it’s time to approach Google and ask if they want an enterprise contract.”
With the acquisition, Commsor’s ambition appears to be broadening a bit. In order for a community to be outwardly valuable to a business, it has to be inwardly healthy. The members have to connect, riff, and have a chance to debate that shared interest that placed them there in the first place. Meetsy works within companies, matching employees to employees, alumni programs, and with venture capitalists that want their portfolio companies to connect with one another as well.
“If Commsor helps you prove the business value of community, and Meetsy helps you build a better community, those two together compound into an even bigger impact.”
Even as growing vaccination rates in the United States may turn on the faucet for in-person interactions, many think there will continue to be a virtual component to interactions especially with distributed teams. Surely enough, the wave of super-connector apps has grown larger as remote work gets deeper roots. The aforementioned Lunch Club was last valued at $100 million, Workvivo raised $16 million in financing, and Gatheround landed $3.5 million seed round last month.
“Every virtual event tool I’ve seen how some sort of networking built into it, but it’s usually what I’d consider ‘dumb networking’,” Reddin said. He’s alluding to the common “speed dating” strategy of placing random people with each other for a few minutes, and then shuffling to repeat.
Meetsy, he said, has refined a robust matching system so a community manager can come in and define people by their self-chosen attributes. It can then fill out match rules based on guidelines for how they want matches to happen. For example, Meetsy could make sure that fintech VCs only meet fintech startups to spark a future investment, or that employees only can meet without employees outside of their current team to promote cross-collaboration.
“That way it’s not just smashing two rocks together and hoping sparks fly,” Reddin said.
The two companies will continue to exist underneath existing branding, but Meetsy users might be able to get a discount on Commsor or benefit from future bundling features. Meetsy has always been free to use but will experiment with new paid features in the future such as white-labeling capabilities, or a tier-system that requires companies to pay once they hit a certain scale of community members.
Tramer, the founder of Meetsy, said that combining tools with Commsor will help community managers “foster meaningful connection at scale and measure the impact of those connections.”
“In 5 years, I see ‘curated introductions’ as a core pillar of community engagement alongside events and forums,” he said.
