Workplace discussion app Hush raises seed funding from Accel, others

Workplace discussion platform Hush has raised an undisclosed amount in a seed round of funding from venture capital firm Accel Partners, Sanjay Nadkarni, who co-founded baby products e-tailer BabyOye and a clutch of angel investors, a company statement said.

The startup will use the capital to build its team, expand to other domestic and international markets, grow its app user base and to roll out a new web app with advanced services, the statement added.

“We are focused on creating a restricted community for each workplace by encouraging employees to voice their opinions on various discussions, starting polls on relevant topics and exchanging views candidly without the fear of retribution (which is the case with traditional forms of feedback),” said Ashutosh Dabral, co-founder of Hush.

Available on the Android and iOS platforms, Hush allows employees to have conversations anonymously. It has dedicated communities for each company which can only be accessed by verified employees within that community. It also has a public forum where one can seek answers from industry peers. Both private and public forums are completely anonymous.

Owned by Bengaluru-based Erbauen Labs Pvt. Ltd, the startup was launched in October 2017 by Dabral and Umesh Joshi. The duo previously worked together at Yahoo! and together launched their first venture—Plastr, a location and interest-based social network—in 2016.

Accel Partners

For the first half of 2018, the Indian arm of global VC firm Accel Partners was the most active in the country, overtaking counterpart Sequoia Capital India. Between January and June this year, it made 12 investments, data from VCCEdge, the research arm of News Corp VCCircle, showed.

Its most recent bets include health and fitness startup CureFit, vernacular knowledge-sharing platform Vokal and  cloud-based business software firm Freshworks.