Parabol, a leading Agile meeting platform, secured a Series A investment of $8 million led by M12, Microsoft’s venture fund, with continued participation from CRV, Haystack, Techstars, and others. The announcement comes on the heels of Parabol’s latest milestone of registering 100,000 users across more than 3,000 companies worldwide to help them make their meetings more efficient and effective. This includes members of the United States Airforce, which awarded Parabol a $1.47 million contract via the Defense Department’s small business innovation research program, to bring Parabol’s Agile meeting platform to  the U.S. military.

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“We’re excited about Parabol’s dual use as an enterprise solution with extensibility into the government and defense sectors,” said Priyanka Mitra, Principal at M12. “The macro trend of distributed teams and remote work are here to stay, beyond the COVID pandemic era. Parabol puts in-person and remote participants on an equal footing, whether teams are brainstorming plans for a product launch or helping to keep the country operating.”

Parabol was founded in August 2015 to help remote and hybrid teams conduct structured meetings essential to Agile teamwork, such as retrospectives and daily stand-ups. By effectively collecting input from all meeting participants regardless of their physical location, Parabol provides an experience that is superior to physical meeting rooms and collaboration with whiteboards. Parabol seamlessly integrates with widely-used applications such as Slack, Jira, and GitHub, and automatically captures and summarizes the meeting output for all participants. Parabol will use its Series A funding to meet customer demand for additional Agile meeting types and add new enterprise features, expanding Parabol’s ability to serve even more kinds of teams.

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“We’re proud to have helped so many organizations move their Agile development processes online during this pandemic,” said CEO and Co-founder of Parabol, Jordan Husney. “We believe nearly every user of backlog management systems—such as Microsoft DevOps, GitHub, Atlassian Jira, GitLab, and Clubhouse—will use an application to facilitate meeting activities atop these systems. With new resources at our disposal, Parabol will establish the ‘agile meeting platform’ category and lead it.”

With its continued growth, Parabol recognizes the need to bring more Agile meeting types to the digital space, beyond retrospectives and check-in meetings. The platform recently launched a new Planning Poker feature, which facilitates project estimation with an easy-to-use interface that integrates with popular project management tools like Jira. As Parabol continues to expand into new meeting types that can be conducted live or asynchronously, they aim to fundamentally change the ways that distributed teams collaborate. By offering an alternative to scheduling a meeting by allowing people to participate in team activities on their own time, Parabol is able to unlock new efficiencies and ways of working for distributed teams around the world.

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