It’s only been a few weeks since Microsoft’s deal to buy Yammer was confirmed, and already the company’s influence seems to be spreading: on Monday productivity startup Teamly announced not only an early investment from one of Yammer’s early team members but also a deeper integration with the service.
Teamly, which produces tools to help workers prioritize different tasks, has raised funds from Elliot Loh, a co-founder of Geni who worked on the early versions of Yammer, as well as Ayaz ul Haque, a partner at Exalt Capital. Already part of the 500 Startups program, it hopes to finalize its $500,000 angel round in the next couple of weeks.
We’ve covered Teamly, which was founded in London, before. It positions itself as a performance management tool, helping employees keep track of their tasks and keeping managers in touch with how staff are progressing. It came out of beta last year and introduced a paid version.
Since then the small team has been working on improvements, and is now launching an enhanced version with a new UI, email integration, mobile access and integration with Yammer. More connections are on the way, including Google Apps.
So is this the Yammer effect in action? Does Microsoft’s involvement mean we will see more startups part of a landrush to support Yammer? After all, there are millions of reasons for hooking in to Yammer that weren’t necessarily there before — both in terms of growth as Microsoft pushes uses towards Yammer, but also the potential for an exit. This could be the beginning of a whole raft of startups aimed at filling in those smaller gaps in Yammer’s offering.
When I asked him how Teamly compared to a service that offered the full stack, Allison played a pretty dead bat.
“Yammer is a general purpose communications platform,” he said. “Teamly is focused on making it easier for manager to track and review their employees, saving them time on meetings, updates and reviews.”
Well, that clears things up.
Photograph of Scott Allison, used under Creative Commons courtesy of Joi Ito
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