Polly.ai raises $1.2 million to help companies poll their employees

Makers of Polly, a poll-making bot that is the most popular in the Bot category of the Slack App Directory, announced the close of a $1.2 million seed round today.

Polly and parent company Subcurrent were made by former Microsoft engineers Samir Diwan and Bilal Aijazi‏. At the Redmond giant, the two felt there was no way to get a pulse from programmers about a project.

“We wanted to create an easy way for the ground level engineers to share their input, and have it done in a quantitative way so management could actually understand if there was just some minor noise amongst the engineers or if the product was truly headed down the wrong path,” Diwan told VentureBeat in an interview on Slack.

Polly tracks processes and the value of work activity. The most popular polls revolve around work sprints and team happiness. Among founders and HR people, popular polls ask about product health or the effectiveness of all-hands meetings.

“On the surface it’s polls, but there’s more to it. We’re really an analytics company. The value we provide back to our users is analytics and insights. We’re able to track trends, voting patterns,” Diwan said.

Companies that use Polly include Soylent, Auth0, and Grammarly. Diwan said thousands of teams have used Polly to make polls but declined to share a specific number. Other companies in the area of polling employees include SurveyMonkey and the Slackbot Simple Poll.

The $1.2 million investment round for the Seattle-based company was led by Amplify Partners.