Founder: Melis Dural
Founding: 2020
Mission: EKOS helps professionals meet and build faster relationships inside and outside of their organizations
Employees: 12
Workplace: Remote
Stage & Capital Raised: Pre-Seed
Investors: Angels
Key Customers: To Be Announced
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): <$25M
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!
EKOS.ai is an “all in one engagement platform for hybrid communities” founded by Melis Dural in 2020. To understand EKOS is to understand Melis. She’s originally from Turkey, traveled to Switzerland for high school, and came to the U.S. when she was 18 to attend Northeastern. She went on to complete her MBA at Babson. To communicate with friends, family, and colleagues she’s pretty much been remote the entirety of her adult life.
She has a knack for building relationships from prior roles doing NGO fundraising and later IT executive recruiting. It got her thinking about what later became EKOS as she networked her way through Boston and around the world. She founded an AI-powered all-in-one engagement platform to revolutionize the way hybrid communities engage, grow and connect with each other.
If you can date from your couch, shouldn’t you be able to network with people from anywhere too?
The way we work and network has changed a lot these past few years and both hybrid work and communities have become the new norm. The challenge with networking today is you might go to an event and only interact with 2% of the people there. If there’s 100 people at a 2 hour event, how many people can you realistically interact with? 10? That’s probably stretching it. Not everyone knows the pac man trick either! And once the event is over, poof. The opportunity has passed. There should be a better way.
EKOS communities are digital spaces where you can turn to people for help or ask questions. They’ve built a user friendly platform with a B2B sales motion on behalf of corporate customers with a plan to open up the onboarding to more users in the months ahead. Strategically, corporate customers are always trying to drive community building efforts through announcements, events, and their partnership networks which keeps bringing users back into the app. EKOS sees 85% attendance rate of RSVP’d users from community events hosted on the platform.
Most communities today use e-mail, Slack, or dare I say…Teams. EKOS is plugging in machine learning features to learn user preferences and make connections more meaningful within their communities. All introductions are double opt-in through the app. From a pricing perspective, individuals may join the public space for free. Organizations that want to manage their own spaces are charged on an admin basis, and each space can have unlimited subspaces. They’re thoughtfully managing Dunbar Effect thinking by limiting subspaces (think channels) to 250 people to keep conversations more meaningful and they’re building the whole digital experience to align with the goal of driving deeper community engagement.
To date, all of EKOS’ growth has been inbound through their existing partners like First Republic, Techstars, and other venture & accelerator programs. They’ll likely shift to an outbound motion after another round of fundraising. In EKOS’ earliest days, the team is focused on creating the network effects around their communities and their momentum is building quickly as they’ve already seen 1000% user growth off of their initial base.
EKOS is a remote startup, with team members in Boston and Turkey, aspiring to build the platform into a cornerstone of the Boston business ecosystem and professional communities far beyond the Commonwealth.
If you’re on mobile or web, click this link to create your profile. Once you complete your profile you can download the iOS app. Any public EKOS user can create an event to host or join a local event in their community in the weeks ahead.
If you’re an accelerator, incubator, innovation lab, or investment group and looking for a place to host your community, book a demo directly with the Founder Melis (she attends them all) here.
Finally, be on the lookout for some exciting news from EKOS in the months ahead!
Operators to Know (Locally):
- Buke Cuhader, Head of Community and Partnerships
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the EKOS team I’m sure I missed some up & coming operators internally
If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:
- What are the key milestones EKOS is looking to reach in the months ahead?
- What are the biggest challenges as you scale the team?
- What is the long term vision for the company?
- What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2023?
We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about EKOS you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more communities into a more collaborative, welcoming age. All networkers and luminaries applaud your efforts. See you around town!