Qatalog, a London-based company creating a “virtual workspace” designed to integrate various software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications and improve team performance, has announced $15 million in Series A funding.

Atomico, a leading European venture capital firm, spearheaded the funding round, with contributions from Salesforce Ventures and several angel investors. These include Jacob de Geer (CEO/co-founder of iZettle), Chris Hitchen (partner at Inventures, founder at Getprice), and Thijn Lamers (former EVP at Adyen). Irina Haivas, a partner at Atomico, will be joining the company’s board as part of this investment.

Current investors also participated in this round, including Mosaic Ventures of London, who led Qatalog’s $3.5 million seed funding in late 2019, while the company was operating in stealth mode. Additional investors are Taavet Hinrikus (co-founder of TransferWise), Paul Forster (founder of Indeed), Ott Kaukver (former CTO of Twilio), Renaud Visage (co-founder of Eventbrite), Philipp Moehring and Andy Chung (Tiny Supercomputer), Andreas Klinger (Remote First Capital), and a number of anonymous angels associated with TransferWise, Deepmind, and Monzo. This brings the total amount of funding secured by the company to $18.5 million.

Qatalog was established in 2019 by Tariq Rauf, who previously served as a global product lead at Amazon and a head of growth at TransferWise. The company’s objective is to consolidate the numerous SaaS tools commonly used in today’s workplaces, such as Teams/Slack, Microsoft/Google Suite, Zoom, Confluence, Jira, Notion, and Asana.

This virtual workspace connects to these different SaaS platforms, organizing content and its connections based on “people, teams, and projects” within a unified interface. By constructing what Rauf refers to as a “work graph,” Qatalog intends to centralize workplace information, making it more readily available and transparent, while also automating routine tasks and enabling communication between SaaS tools. The goal is to empower teams to work more efficiently and foster improved collaboration across the organization.

To address these challenges, Rauf states that Qatalog has created a “single source of truth” for company teams, projects, and personnel, along with all related “supplementary information.” This involves integrating various tools, locations, and systems, and providing additional “features and capabilities that streamline the process of accessing, retrieving, sharing, and coordinating work.”

In some respects, Qatalog resembles a contemporary workplace intranet, but with a SaaS-centric and modular design. Alternatively, it can be viewed as a solution to the limitations of SaaS tools, which excel at addressing specific problems but struggle to scale when used in isolation or when users attempt to add functionality beyond their core capabilities. A method for re-integrating this fragmented functionality, along with the associated information and workflows, is needed to reduce the reliance on makeshift solutions like spreadsheets or extensive documents for consolidating processes and organizational knowledge.

“We connect to a company’s existing tools, gather as much information as possible, and request additional details when necessary,” Rauf clarifies. “Users can then search across their workspace and tools from a central location; establish teams and projects and link disparate systems to them; define measurable goals and connect them to various tools, people, teams, and projects; and develop workflows that can be assigned and monitored within the team.”

These “workflows” can range from simple procedures like requesting time off to more complex work assignments. The key innovation lies not only in the creation and presentation of workflows but also in how they are powered by Qatalog’s “work graph.” This minimizes data entry when connecting individuals, teams, and SaaS tools to workflow steps and ensures two-way information flow. Completing a task within Qatalog can automatically update information in platforms like Slack or Google Calendar, and vice versa. Furthermore, this type of work graph could potentially facilitate greater automation and the implementation of work macros in the future.

Regarding Qatalog’s ideal customer, Rauf indicates that companies with 50 or more employees and distributed teams have proven to be a good fit, as that is when internal systems and informal knowledge management practices typically become inadequate. “At that stage, most companies have also likely adopted 10 or more tools and find that accessing information requires manual coordination by employees,” he notes.