Honey lands a tasty $1M to find the social enterprise sweet spot

Enterprise social platform Honey is announcing some sweet news today — a $1 million seed round.

There is no shortage of enterprise social solutions these days, but Brooklyn-based digital agency Huge — owned by the Interpublic Group of Companies — apparently felt it couldn’t find the right one.

Huge’s Honey was incubated in the agency’s Labs program two years ago as a way to streamline secure connections between global teams.

Honey CEO Rachel Kaplowitz told me via email that most enterprise social platforms fall into one of two categories: traditional enterprise software like SharePoint and custom-built intranets; or chat-focused solutions like Slack and HipChat.

The former, she said, “are not user-friendly and are typically difficult to implement,” while the latter “don’t work at scale for company-wide internal communications needs.”

Honey counters those choices with a user interface Kaplowitz called “a superior design people love to use,” plus the ability to implement and customize the software without calling on IT or encountering hidden fees. Features include rich media posting, file and image sharing, content-based and private groups, content feeds, commenting and mentions, email notifications, and analytics.

Above: Desktop and mobile screens in Honey

Image Credit: Honey

Among the various internal communications tools out there, Kaplowitz sees SharePoint and Yammer as the biggest competitors. She described them as “frustrating to use, difficult to implement, expensive to manage, and rarely engaged with once introduced to an organization.”

Launched in 2013, Honey claims over a hundred paying customer companies, including Capital One, Sesame Workshop, and Lowe’s Home Improvement.

The new funding, from Point Nine Capital, is Honey’s first outside money. It will be used for growing the company’s engineering, customer success, and support teams.