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Tallinn-based startup KOOS has raised $4M in seed funding led by Plural Platform with participation from LocalGlobe, Tiny.vc, and Matt Clifford. The Estonian platform enables businesses to grow with their community, turning stakeholders into co-owners. KOOS previously received an angel pre-seed round of $600,000 from an array of high-profile Estonian founders. Plural’s investment comes with advisory support from Estonian founders and Plural Platform’s partners – Taavet Hinrikus and Sten Tamkivi – who will join KOOS as advisors. The funding allows KOOS to launch the platform in the UK and across Europe as more companies seek to elevate the role of stakeholders to drive business growth.
KOOS, which means ‘together’ and ‘alongside’ in Estonian, was founded earlier this year by serial entrepreneur and former CIO of Estonia Taavi Kotka. Created to serve organisations who are committed to giving a true stake to their contributors, the KOOS stakeholder incentivisation platform provides a brand new way of rewarding and motivating everyone who contributes to a company’s growth and success.
Kotka explains “At KOOS we believe technologies can be used to help build a more equitable society. To be successful you need to deliver great value to all your stakeholders and we have come up with a digital tool that allows businesses to engage and reward their community, widening the circle of people who have access to equity-like incentives which in turn increases the pool of people who will advocate for the business and want it to succeed. We offer companies a new way of achieving their business goals more efficiently, while simultaneously improving their financial and social impact performance.”
Plural’s investment also comes with the support of founders-turned-investors Taavet Hinrikus, former CEO of Wise (formerly TransferWise) and Sten Tamkivi, co-founder of Teleport, both of which will take on active advisory roles to accelerate the roll out of the KOOS platform. The investors join a host of other successful technology founders backing KOOS, including fellow Estonians Markus Villig, founder of Bolt, and Kaarel Kotkas, founder and CEO of Verrif. KOOS is built with support from top legal firm Ellex in emerging tech, adopting a recognised legal framework that complies with EU and UK law.
Sten Tamkivi, adviser and Plural Platform co-founder, said: “Plural wants to invest to help create a more equal society. We believe that broader community ownership leads to more meritocratic systems so that wealth can be distributed based on actual contributions. KOOS has come up with a way to track the support of all stakeholders in a community or business, without having to give away equity. We anticipate that the platform KOOS is building will become an essential building block of many startups, funds and communities including charities and NGOs.”
Ziv Reichert, partner, LocalGlobe, said: “KOOS is spearheading the democratisation of community-led growth by allowing all stakeholders – users, partners, suppliers – of a given business to have the potential to earn their slice of the pie. KOOS enables businesses to easily align their key objectives with community incentives, turning stakeholders into shareholders. To us, this future is inevitable and the winners of the next decade will be those organisations that put their communities at the core of how they operate and grow. With genuinely world-class talent in the team, we are excited to see KOOS powering this shift.”
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