Offsite Raises $3 Million To Reconnect Remote and Hybrid Companies Through In-Person Experiences
Today, we're excited to announce that Offsite has raised $3 million to continue building a curated marketplace and tech-enabled services that save time, money, and stress for remote and hybrid teams planning team retreats.
Founded in 2021, Offsite has planned hundreds of team retreats in over 15 countries for clients ranging from hospitals to hedge funds, focused primarily on supporting startups such as LinkSquares, Airbyte, Metabase, 15Five, mParticle, Flex, and Rattle, as well as communities like Hampton, YPO, and LifeLabs Learning, and venture capital firms such as Greylock.
We're thrilled to introduce some of Offsite's latest investors, including:
- Forum Ventures (one of the leading B2B SaaS accelerators and seed funds)
- Automattic (makers of WordPress and Tumblr)
- Right Side Capital
Other institutional investors include Integral Private, Splash Capital, and Genius Ventures. Over 60 angel investors have also participated including co-founders and CEOs from Remote, Vendr, Convene, 15Five, Gainsight, and ChartMogul, as well as domain experts like top executives from Airbnb, HubSpot, and Pendo.
In addition to announcing our latest financing, we are welcoming Mike Cardamone, CEO and Managing Director of Forum Ventures, to our Board of Directors.
Offsites Are An Exploding Niche In A $500B Market
Spend on Corporate Travel Is Expected To Surpass $500B by 2030 According To Allied Market Research
Offsite is uniquely positioned to serve a wide range of Chiefs of Staff, Executive Assistants, and other "People Leaders" at remote and hybrid organizations who plan company events with our mix of end-to-end service and software.
Offsite currently offers two main ways to plan your team retreat. Event organizers can:
- Search a curated, Airbnb-style marketplace with hundreds of offsite venues around the world or
- Purchase end-to-end retreat planning services for an affordable, per-person flat fee.
Offsite’s marketplace has pre-negotiated discounts with properties on room blocks, meeting spaces, food and beverage, and more. Through our marketplace, event organizers can consolidate weeks of venue searching into a few clicks, and save 20% or more on some of the biggest budget line items for any offsite.
Offsite’s end-to-end planning services include everything from flight-booking to venue selection, negotiating, and contracting, agenda creation, budget management, procuring travel visas, making restaurant reservations, and managing vendors such as activity providers, photographers, videographers, outside speakers and facilitators, ground transportation providers, event production staff, and more!
"Offsite is building something all companies need - a platform that helps team members reconnect in-person with their colleagues and fosters deeper trust, intimacy, and collaboration.
We work hard every day at Remote to ensure that remote work can be accessible to everyone, but every once in a while, it's important to facilitate greater connection, which is where a team retreat or offsite would come in handy. I'm excited to see how Offsite can help thousands of companies make team retreat planning easier over time." - Job Van der Voort, Co-Founder/CEO of Remote
Creating A "One Stop Shop" For Planning Team Retreats
As a teenager, I was fortunate to become one of the first ten employees at 15Five, one of the leading employee engagement and retention platforms. After working at 15Five for a couple years, I wrote a series of award-winning books, spoke at TED and TEDx among corporate keynotes for Fortune 1000 companies, and spent three years organizing quarterly summits for successful tech founders and small business owners.
As a result of these various experiences, I found myself attending, speaking at, and facilitating offsites around the world over a decade leading up to the pandemic.
During the pandemic, I was betting the decades-long shift to more decentralized workforces would accelerate, meaning the number of offsites planned by remote and hybrid teams in particular would grow exponentially (and the importance of those offsites would increase dramatically as a result).
To-date, no one has developed a true "one stop shop" experience to solve the logistical challenges of planning offsites or team retreats.
We think Offsite can be the team to make it happen.
After a couple years, we’ve developed a growing community of clients, partners, team members, and investors who believe in our vision for what a successful marketplace and platform could become in this space - which is both humbling and exciting!
While the debate rages on about remote versus in-office work, it is undeniable that most companies are increasingly distributed, with ongoing needs for employees to intentionally connect for strategic planning, team-building, creative brainstorming, problem-solving, engaging customers, and more.
"We think hybrid and more flexible work is here to stay for many industries, which will cause a decrease in spend for office space and an increase in the need for offsites, retreats and in-person get togethers for teams to collaborate. As those dollars shift, we believe Offsite is well positioned to build a very big business providing world class experiences for these companies." - Mike Cardamone, CEO and Managing Director at Forum Ventures
Join Us In Making The World A More Connected Place
Today, we are already regarded as one of the leading companies providing offsite planning services, and we're only getting started.
To receive beta access to our curated marketplace of offsite venues (featuring over 250 hotels and unique offsite destinations), please visit www.offsite.com and click "get started" - there's no credit card required to create an account.
We also have a user and client community on Slack called Team Retreat Planning, so join us there to connect with hundreds of other People Leaders planning offsites at their companies.
Finally, you can follow us on Twitter @offsite or visit www.offsite.com for additional resources and updates.