Standing On Its Own: Wix Spin-Off daPulse Scores 1.5m Series A For Its Internal Communications Tool

It’s always interesting to see when a company builds a product on the side purely to scratch its own itch, and then decides that said product has the making of a startup in itself. That appears to be the case with daPulse which, broadly speaking, plays in the enterprise social network space, and spun out of web publishing platform Wix as a venture in its own right in February of this year.

Today, daPulse is announcing its first funding round: a Series A to the tune of $1.5 million from GenesisPartners. The investment will be used to further develop the startup’s topic-based internal communication tool — a sort of Yammer, Saleforce’s Chatter, or Socialcast competitor — and to enter new markets, specifically giving its marketing efforts a shot in the arm in the US and Europe.

Designed to encourage employees to share updates without creating too much noise, daPulse places greater emphasis on topics — known as pulses – which users follow instead of each other. This way, they only follow and interact with projects, news, developments, teams, customer updates and the like, that are of interest. Or so the pitch goes.

Started in 2010 as an internal project, daPulse’s approach to company internal communication was born out of the needs of the distributed team working at Wix. “We cracked it by being topic-centered. Employees can easily screen the information they’re exposed to by opting to follow only pulses that are relevant to them and ignoring those that aren’t”, says daPulse CEO and co-founder Roy Man in a statement.

To date, however, the product has only seen a limited roll out. It’s currently used in “over 15 companies and by thousands of employees”, says daPulse. After today’s investment, we’d expect this to begin ramping up — although, suffice it to say, the startup is playing in a very crowded space. A space that, thanks to Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Yammer, now includes the behemoth that is Redmond.