MURAL’s digital workspace for visual collaboration

MURAL is a San Francisco, California-based technology startup providing a digital workspace with an emphasis on visual collaboration.

Thanks to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the world has seen a huge uptake in remote working, and a glut of tools to make the transition more seamless.

MURAL’s approach favours recreating the physical visual aids which may have been lost, such as diagrams, drawings and sticky notes on collaborative whiteboards, with tools supporting the agile and design thinking approaches common to many technology teams.

The company claims to have more than a million monthly active users, with its platform being used within companies such as IBM, GitHub and Atlassian.

MURAL also integrates with popular collaboration systems such as Slack, Microsoft Teams and Google Drive.

Since its foundation in 2011, the company has raised over $140mn across four funding rounds. Its latest Series B round, announced yesterday, saw MURAL receive $118mn from lead investor Insight Partners, alongside World Innovation Lab, Tiger Global Management, Slack Fund, Ryan Smith, Gradient Ventures, Bill Veghte and Allison Pickens.

In a press release, Mariano Suarez-Battan, co-founder and CEO, said: “Imagination at work is key to innovation. The visual methods made popular to collaborate on ideas are here to guide us. Early adopters in some of the largest organizations in the world realized that they don't need to be in the same room to turn imagination into innovation through visual collaboration. They now feel comfortable doing product strategy, improving processes, and engaging customers remotely. Today, everybody else is rushing to develop this level of remote work fluency. With this funding and the expansion of our team, we are ready to support teams all over the world in their journey."

The company said it would use the funds to drive adoption of its platform for new use cases within organisations and develop new features, among other pursuits.