As companies adopt new tools to accommodate remote ways of work, it’s becoming tougher for their workforces to keep track of and manage information across internal services. It’s not just the C-suite that’s being challenged — lower-level employees, too, are having to wrestle with employers’ now-sprawling catalogs of apps. According to Statista, the average enterprise uses 110 software-as-a-service apps today, up from eight in 2015. Coveo found that, as a result, workers spend just over 3 hours a day searching for information in 2022, an hour more compared to a year ago.
If you ask Perttu Ojansuu, the answer is an intranet, or a company-specific, digital portal that centralizes much of a businesses’ software and documentation in one place. Ojansuu recognizes his bias — he co-founded Happeo, a startup developing intranet software to connect employees with company tools. But Ojansuu says that his view was shaped by his experiences working with customers at Gapps, a Finland-based Google Workspace reseller he helped to co-found in 2010.
“[With Gapps,] co-founder Antero Hanhirova and I saw a big opportunity to help enterprise companies in the Nordics with their cloud transformation,” Ojansuu told TechCrunch in a recent interview. “During our Gapps time, we identified a significant and consistent challenge that our customers were facing: there wasn’t any central source of truth for information that could be readily integrated with other software-as-a-service tools … In 2016, born from that customer challenge, we decided to create a comprehensive solution for our customers.”
Using Happeo’s editing tools to build an intranet portal.
Ojansuu and Hanhirova launched Happeo’s first incarnation, “Universe,” in early 2016. In 2017, the two…