High Alpha company tackling remote work space
INDIANAPOLIS (Inside INdiana Business) — High Alpha venture studio in Indianapolis has launched a startup focusing on improving the virtual meeting landscape. Filo co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Matt Compton says the company’s platform enables customers to design virtual spaces, seeing each other working and collaborating without having to be in the same spot. The platform was originally created for High Alpha to host its first virtual Sprint Week last May.
In an interview with Inside INdiana Business, Compton said Filo sits on top of the commonly-used technologies such as Zoom or Microsoft Teams.
“We have a very deep integration with Zoom and what we do is provide a space that you can bring anywhere from 20 people to thousands of people together to engage over a larger period of time,” said Compton. “So we will have multiple rooms within a space sitting on top of Zoom. People can jump in and out of large conversations, see which conversations are happening in which rooms at any given time, share documents, chat, work on collaborative whiteboards, do Q&A video livestreaming, all sitting on top of technologies like Zoom.”
Compton, a veteran of ExactTarget and Salesforce who also founded the mobile app development platform Waysay, says High Alpha, like many organizations, nearly had to cancel its Sprint Week due to the pandemic before developing what was then known as “Spaces by High Alpha.”
“We put a small team together, kicked off on April 1st and spent four weeks building the first prototype and ran an 80-person design workshop for four full days. It went amazingly well; so well, in fact, that we said we should probably take this to market.”
Filo currently has more than 20 customers including Techstars and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Compton says the feedback has been very positive and shown that while individual productivity had increased during the pandemic, group collaboration had been on the decline.
“The feedback we’ve had is just being able to see and have visibility of the various conversations that are happening at any point in time, being able to jump in and out of conversations, having these five-minute ‘tap on the shoulder’ conversations again has really improved not individual productivity, but the group productivity as a whole.”
Filo currently has eight employees and Compton says the company is looking to hire for sales, customer success and software engineering positions.
Filo is the 10th company to launch out of High Alpha in 2020.