Employee social network Mesh raises funds from Y Combinator, others

One of Silicon Valley's most influential startup incubators, Y Combinator, has backed Mesh, an internal social network for employees.

The funding round also saw participation from the founders of Cure.fit, Meesho and CleverTap as well as US seed-stage fund Liquid 2 Ventures and angel investors like Xiaomi Indonesia head Alvin Tse, Sumon Sadhu - who has previously backed startups like Cleartax, Benchling, and Mercury founder Immad Akhund among others.

Started in March this year by Saurabh Nangia, Rahul Singh, and Gaurav Chaubey, Mesh is building an internal social platform for companies that makes it easier for employees to track their daily and weekly tasks, manage long-terms goals, and get timely feedback from managers.


The goals can be further broken down into smaller or more granular action items by individuals or their managers and certain sensitive goals can also be marked private.

"At present, corporates typically use two disparate platforms, one for managing their monthly and quarterly goals, and another one for managing their daily and weekly deliverables. We are offering both in a central place, thereby making performance management a simple, ongoing habit rather than a forced, periodic process" chief executive Saurabh Nangia told ET.


Mesh also has a Facebook-like social feed that helps employees interact with their co-workers, to recreate a physical office environment. Users can share their work progress as well as like and comment on their co-workers' progress on the feed.

Nangia said positive feedback is shared publicly on the feed by default while constructive feedback is delivered only to the specific individual.

Over time, Mesh starts curating the user's public profile showcasing their top strengths, competencies and contributions based on the progress made on their goals and feedback received from other employees.

In the future, Mesh also plans to integrate data from third-party platforms like customer relationship management platforms onto the feed, Nangia said.

"The goal is to capture real-time data about employees and start giving these insights back to both employees, as well as the leaders and the managers within the company," he said. The startup counts 1mg, ClearTax, ShareChat and Fampay among its early customers.