Semana, the startup that aims to reinvent office life, raises over €700k from Entrepreneur First, business angels and the BPI to accelerate its product and business development.
Telecommuting is becoming more widespread, and workspaces are becoming more diverse and decentralized. Organizations find flexibility, comfort and an opportunity to rationalize the use of their office space.
In this context, how to know who is where and make sure that teams see each other. How to manage space allocation within the limits of increasingly constrained capacity.
Semana.io is a new generation flex office tool that organizes employee presence and optimizes space allocation based on a set of pre-defined rules.
Q: What is the inspiration behind your business?
Semana was born in May 2020 when the entire Europe was undergoing its first lockdown. With the massive rise of remote working, we realized that workspaces were becoming more and more decentralized and distributed over a multitude of locations (offices, homes, coworking, transportation, etc.), creating a multitude of new challenges: Who is where and when? How do you ensure that teams see each other?
Furthermore, as more and more office space is becoming unoccupied, many organizations are asking themselves how to rationalize their workspace and are considering a transition to flex office management with fewer and fewer workstations per employee. How do you manage space allocation and ensure that office capacity is never exceeded?
Q: What is your magic sauce?
Traditionally, the management of workspaces was the responsibility of general services, while the management of schedules and telework was the responsibility of HR functions. Now these two activities can no longer be separated. Our uniqueness comes from the convergence of these activities.
In concrete terms, Semana is unique in its ability to combine the time optimization of work schedules and the space optimization of office allocation:
- Attendance policy. Minimum, maximum, fixed number of days, rotation rules,
- Space management: Areas, distancing, dedicated desks
- Dashboard: Planning and monitoring of policy, occupancy rates, frequency of employee contact, space usage, etc.
