Female-founded, collaborative planning platform for support teams, Surfboard picks $5M in a seed round

With participation from current investors Fly Ventures and Seedcamp, Surfboard, a London-based collaborative planning platform for support teams, has secured $5M in a Seed round led by Speedinvest.

The Founders of Sennder, Stan Masseuras from Intercom, Tim Sadler and Edward Bishop of Tessian, Felix Jahn from McMakler, Alex Hersham from Zencargo, Nomad Capital, Foreword VC, Tokyo Black, and Jag Singh were among the notable angels who took part in the round.

The UK business will spend money on quickening product development, expanding its staff, strengthening integrations, and adding additional functionality.

“Poorly managed scheduling starts a vicious circle of extended wait times, lost revenue, employee churn, and increased costs,” asserts Natasha Ratanshi-Stein, CEO and founder of Surfboard. It is essential to manage your team effectively and fairly if you want to consider your support staff as profit centers.

I have firsthand experience with the demoralizing impact that the current workforce management technologies, including spreadsheets, have on support staff at a human level. Individual team members should be free to collaborate with management and their teammates to support teams to success. That is our goal for Surfboard, she continues.

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein founded Surfboard in 2021, and its collaborative planning software will let support teams schedule tasks more flexibly and connect current tooling more effectively.

The company’s solution can integrate systems for ticketing, chat, and phone calls like Aircall, Dixa, Intercom, Salesforce, and Zendesk.

It enables organizations to simply create the best support team schedules by helping them develop forecasts to determine how many people will be needed online and when they will be needed based on different aspects, including availability, talents, and fairness.

According to the company’s claims, consumers have seen a considerable improvement in service levels and an 80% reduction in time spent scheduling.

These are some of the clients that the business currently works with: Bloom & Wild, Cuckoo Internet, Lick, Wolf & Badger, KatKin, and Hypervolt. Ratanshi-Stein confirms that the company currently employs about 13 individuals, of whom 6 are women, and that women of color make up 66% of the board.

“Across our portfolio, we see several companies scaling customer service,” said Deepali Nangia, Partner at Speedinvest and the person behind the round. With the change to remote support and the emphasis on customer retention, support is now much more complex and crucial. We are thrilled to help a capable entrepreneur and team and fervently support Surfboard’s goal of promoting improved support staff productivity and communication.

“We are thrilled with Surfboard’s growth since we wrote their first check in early 2021,” stated Reshma Sohoni, managing partner at Seedcamp. Their prompt response, unwavering commitment to the welfare of their “surfers” and customer pleasure, as well as their long-term vision, will boost customer support and success more cooperatively and effectively for the benefit of all parties. Natasha has experience dealing with the issue and is qualified to do so.

Image Credit: Surfboard