Blink

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Founder: Sean Nolan
Founding: 2015
Mission: Connect everyone, so everyone thrives
Employees: 80 & 35% Local
Workplace: Hybrid
Stage & Capital Raised: Series A & $30.7M raised
Investors: Next47, with participation from early investors Partech, Techstars and Workday
Key Customers: RATPDev, Elara Caring,, Saint Luke’s, Physicians Ambulance, Transit Systems
Glassdoor Rating: 4.2
Valuation (estimated): $100M+ (assuming they sold ~10-20% of the company in the Q4 ‘21 $20M Series A fundraise)
^ this is a useless number from MGMT Boston. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!

Blink is building a “super app” for frontline organizations to make working lives easier, uplevel their internal cultural experience, and help employers better understand how their disparate workers are thinking & feeling. This team is building a better workplace experience platform for desk based employees to connect with their deskless colleagues who spend their days out in the world, fixing our problems and servicing our needs – and traditionally are hard to reach.

Blink Founder Sean Nolan was building a telecom company in the early 2000s called Tomorrow Communications which provided network design, data center, and managed services for enterprises through a successful acquisition by CACI in 2012. 

Tomorrow Communications had more than 200 employees who were out in the field every day, servicing customers and calls. Sean and his corporate colleagues often only saw that portion of their workforce once a month. It was difficult to get everyday, practical things done like complete timesheets or file expenses. 

How do you build a strong culture for essential workers who aren’t really around?

Sean’s team built some internal tools to get stuff done and amplify culture the best they could. But it wasn’t their business. So when the company was sold the solution went away with it. 

Sean took some time off to travel and ski. But when he was traveling through Asia and got exposed to “super apps” like WeChat for the first time, the wheels started turning. For the unfamiliar Westerner, WeChat is a communications app that also houses identity, payments, security, and discovery use cases all within its pixels.

Sean had been interested in online communities & chat rooms since he was an introverted teenager, ripping Compuserve & AOL CDs off of magazines to get online to chat with people on his PC. He comes from a blue collar family of teachers & bus drivers who struggled to access enterprise technology from their mobile phones. Existing solutions only really served desk workers. 

In the U.S. there are more than 40M frontline workers with deskless workers encompassing 37% of the total workforce (src). These are employees in industries like healthcare, retail, manufacturing, higher education, utilities & transportation (src).

For example, in-home care nurses work out on their own the vast majority of the time. It can feel isolating. We all know frontline organizations struggle to recruit employees. There aren’t enough drivers, retail workers, manufacturing workers or healthcare workers. Some Blink customers (before Blink) had to drive up to 4 hours to get administrative paperwork submitted. They struggle to retain them too, with up to 65% of caregivers quitting in their first year (src). The existing employee experience certainly hasn’t helped. 

Blink started in the UK transit industry in 2015 and Sean wistfully recalls that pretty much every VC in London rejected him but he found a couple crazy Angel investors to back his vision. After navigating the initial customer journey, they focused on rolling out a new solution to uplevel the employee experience for frontline organizations.

Blink has unlocked mobile access to pay stubs, shift swapping, overtime work & digital forms to help companies with large workforces operate better. They paired these “must haves” with important enterprise tools like the ability to login without an e-mail address, enterprise grade privacy & security, and the ability to wipe an app remotely in the event of an offboarding.

Most importantly, they haven’t stopped there. They’re building community into the Blink app to better connect employees on the go. Blink combines communication capabilities with productivity & utility for every worker, wherever they are. They have the industry’s highest adoption rate and usage because of their tight integrations with existing apps like ServiceNow, Workday, ADP, and DailyPay. 

Healthcare is their largest and fastest growing segment with transit, manufacturing, logistics, and retail rounding out the customer base. Convincing customers that their solution works has been the biggest challenge.

Convincing customers that Blink really can deliver on transforming culture, operations, communication and productivity with one tool was a challenge.  However, now with 100+ enterprise customers shouting from the rooftops about Blink has certainly helped scale in specific industries and grow effectively. It definitely helps to now be able to introduce prospects to their 100+ existing enterprise customer footprint so they can scale out industry specific GTM models to grow more effectively.

In the coming quarters they plan to roll out their workforce insights & frontline intelligence product. AI generated questions will help dig into employee concerns and feed the insights back to HQ where executives can diagnose and solve turnover challenges. Blink is diligently co-developing these new features with current customers.

Eighteen months ago they made the decision to expand from the UK to the US. Sean moved to Boston and hired CRO Jim McInerny to build out the team. In the months since they’ve added local leadership like Sloan Kendall from Gainsight, Marcy Paterson from ServiceNow, and Amanda Haltmaier from HubSpot. Blink counts almost 20 employees locally here in Boston.

In Boston they’re strong in the EMS sector so ambulance personnel at companies like Cataldo & Action Ambulance aren’t rushing back to the office after saving peoples lives to file paperwork! Even the MBTA is a customer.

In 2023 Blink grew U.S. top line revenue by 159% and welcomed 52 new customers, now counting over 100 enterprise customers. In 2024 they will continue to focus on the U.S., its fastest growing market, planning to double the size of their U.S. headcount over the next 12 months. 

For Sean, Boston has been the best combination for a European founder – easy commutability home to the UK, time zone overlap, a great culture, and access to top talent as an Enterprise SaaS startup. And on a personal note,  it felt like a great place to raise a family building a startup for the long haul.

Operators to Know (Locally):

My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Blink team I know I missed many up & coming operators internally

Key Roles To Be Hired:

If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:

  • Could you share some details about the onboarding process & training? 
  • What are the biggest challenges as you scale the team past 100 employees? 
  • What is the long term vision for the company? 
  • What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2024 / / teams that need the most help?

We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Blink you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more frontline organizations and their deskless workforce into the digital age. All consumers applaud your efforts. See you around town!

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