James Brogan’s life has changed a lot since we last met four years ago when he had just co-founded PepTalk, a team engagement and action platform. With his wife Niamh, he now has two children – a three-year-old and one under one. “It is good old craic,” he laughs. “But it is mad. Your body adjusts to the lack of sleep.”

Brogan, a solicitor by training, is meeting me for coffee to discuss the €1.2 million seed round that PepTalk closed last September. He wants to tell me about its international expansion plan: Britain in the short term, Scandinavia in the medium term and then the United States. It is an ambitious plan for PepTalk, which has already attracted big-name customers like PayPal, Global Payments, AIB and Kirby Engineering.

From scratch, Brogan and his co-founders – his cousin, the seven-time All-Ireland winner Bernard Brogan and human resources expert Michelle Fogarty – have grown the business to monthly recurring revenue of more than €100,000. This is a significant achievement but the challenge we want to discuss is how PepTalk can scale beyond that.

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The Irish start-up ecosystem is relatively tight-knit. James Brogan says he was introduced to Haatch Ventures, which led PepTalk’s seed round, by other Irish entrepreneurs who have been backed by the East Midlands-based firm. “I know Devan Hughes from Buymie and the Scurri guys so Haatch came highly recommended,” he says.

Founded in 2018, Haatch is run by Scott Weavers-Wright, his wife Elaine, and their friend and business partner Fred Soneya. The trio previously built up an online childrenswear and accessories business called Kiddicare, which they sold to Morrisons in 2011 for £70 million.

According to Brogan, the Haatch investment was closed entirely virtually and done in just three months. Enterprise Ireland and a small number of angels also participated in the round. One of the reasons PepTalk wanted to take in British investors was to help it grow its business in that market. “We wanted a partner who could really help us,” he says.

Brogan says the arrival of Covid-19 and heightened concerns in firms about employee wellbeing and retention had driven the decision to raise a seed round. “Ultimately, Covid has been a tailwind behind our business,” he says. “Our revenues, our customer base, have all grown so we felt it was right time to raise money to go international.”

Brogan has spoken before about going into the United States, but that is not on the immediate horizon. “For the next six months it is about the UK,” he says. “We also look at other parts of Europe like Scandinavia. For us bringing in venture capital is a validation of what we are trying to do and a way to propel the business forward.”

PepTalk has over 13,000 users spread across 19 countries, so it already has a presence in the United States, and it even has users as far away as Manila in the Philippines. “We know we are scaleable,” Brogan says, adding that PepTalk had expanded overseas to date mainly by winning a customer in Ireland, who then starts using it in its other offices overseas.

“Ireland has been great in getting us to know big organisations and to understand their needs,” Brogan says. “It has allowed us to develop our technology in a way that allows us to service any global customer.” 

Scaling, hiring, investing

In December 2020 it hired Andrew Finnigan as head of growth, and Brogan said this hire marked a more focused strategy on expanding overseas. Finnigan has previously worked in sales for tech firms like Hitachi Vantara, Oracle and Colt, so he understands how to win international customers from Ireland.   “Andrew has 20 years’ experience in sales,” Brogan says. “He understands how to build sales and marketing functions. We want to scale the business and he is helping us put the right processes in place to build a repeatable sales model.”

PepTalk has also hired behavioural psychologists. “Ultimately, we want to drive behavioural change because that is ultimately what organisations are looking for,” Brogan says. “If you’re going to try and change your culture you need to build habits and to understand what these look like.”

PepTalk employs 20 people and is hiring four more following the seed round. “We’re hiring on the product side, data science, sales and marketing,” Brogan said. “Every organisation right now is trying to figure out where the world of work is going – hybrid, remote, whatever way you play it, ultimately culture is becoming ever more important.” 

Brogan can reel off the stats to support this thesis – from McKinsey finding that two-thirds of US-based employees surveyed have found Covid-19 has caused them to reflect on their purpose in life to  Gartner finding that employees perform better when their employers support them better in their lives not just their jobs.  

PepTalk has developed a digital platform to deliver real-time data and insights that allow companies and their teams to work together better. “We understand that energising, motivating and ultimately retaining your team is essential to success,” Brogan says. “PepTalk provides the tools that enable managers and leaders in an organisation to build a great culture.

“Using real-time data and insights, our platform delivers actions aimed at creating positive habits and behaviour change that will improve employee engagement and wellbeing.”

Taken together Peptalk believes this leads to better teamwork and more engagement as well as allowing managers to understand their employees better even if they are working remotely.

When I ask Brogan to give an example of Peptalk in action., he points to a recently introduced feature called Team Check-in. “This is an opportunity for a manager on a monthly basis to get a read on his or her team,” Brogan says. “It lets managers get a sense who needs to be motivated, who needs an arm around the shoulder.

“Companies are usually very strong on surveys, but there is a delta between the insight and action. We want to give managers and teams the ability to intervene in the moment.”

This could lead to managers, for example, running meetings differently, or working on a plan to energise their people. “For organisations to be successful now, it’s about zoning in on teams and figuring out the habits that need to be cultivated,” he explains.

Companies, he says, need to think about leading and lagging indicators of performance. “The lagging indicator is employee retention,” he explains. “The lagging indicator is executives in a business realising they have a retention problem.”

He says PepTalk could alert companies to emerging issues six months before they happen, allowing them to take early action. “We can find trends. If the morale on a team is coming up anxious for three months in a row, then there are concerns about burnout,” he says. “We can suggest what to do, and help organisations retain their talent.” 

PepTalk’s brand is youthful and accessible and aimed at a younger demographic. Could that put older people off? Not so, according to Brogan, who said PepTalk is more a bridge that can be used across teams with different backgrounds.  

“There is a non-corporate feel to the brand,” Brogan says. “Certainly, we’re presenting a more modern view of how work can be humanised. Managers are being asked to lead in a different way. It is people that are potentially looking to engage with the cohort of 20-year-olds and they’re maybe 40 and they’re feeling a disconnect. But they need something to engage with them.”

“If you’re a team and you have a very diverse team in terms of age and different cultures managers need to try to figure out how to engage that cohort around topics and interest areas that are of use to them. We’re about being of service to teams and ultimately managers that are trying to engage their people.”

A Series A on the horizon?

What are the big changes James Brogan sees coming in how we work? “Work from anywhere is the first thing but then it is working at any time,” Brogan says. “‘I want to be able to get up in the morning and work from 6 am to 9 am, then go surfing from nine to 12 and then go back to work. Or you want to spend time with your kids. That is all happening.”

He explains that PepTalk can help companies stay in touch with teams working at different times as well as remotely. It has already designed a programme called Night Owl for PayPal to support its shift workers in this area. “We have developed something that is bespoke to PayPal, but this is going to be a universal challenge for organisations,” he says. “People want to live or work in a particular way. But if companies can build the right habits and environment around them then performance will improve as they are more engaged.” 

PepTalk has monthly recurring revenue of over €100,000, and now a seed round but it is going after big markets. How soon will it raise again? “We’re certainly at a point in our journey where a Series A round will be on the cards for us in the next six to nine months,” he replies.

The scale of the markets being targeted by PepTalk will require significant investment to break into. “Without a doubt,” Brogan says. “Our seed round was about creating the platform for a series A. It was putting a little more fuel in the tank to allow us to capture the opportunity that was in front of us I guess in terms of COVID and everything that is happening. But ultimately it is about a Series A. We have global ambition.”

“We see a gap in that space to help teams.” 

James Brogan’s cofounder Bernard Brogan is well known and admired in Ireland for his sporting success. This might have opened doors for PepTalk in its early days but as it moves into Britain it is about the PepTalk brand and product. “Ultimately the brand and the product need to stand on its own two feet,” Brogan said. “We’ve done that. We have signed up great companies who renew.”

He said AIB, one of its first big customers, signed up again last year for over two years more. “In the early stages certainly having a network opens a couple of doors,” Brogan says. “But you have to deliver impact and value.

“Our brand is different, it’s unique. Our product is, we feel, unique and different. So, we had no real reservations about what we can do. In the next year, you’re going to see our brand amplified and the awareness of the company growing. But ultimately, it’s all about our product.

“We want to disrupt traditional views on wellbeing and traditional views on engagement. For the new world of work, it’s going to have to be a lot more dynamic.

“You’re just not going to be able to wait around for the annual engagement survey to stop people from leaving.”

Brogan says PepTalk was about supporting managers as well as employees: “The manager piece has become really important for us because we keep talking to companies who say we’ve not enough supports for managers, managers are stressed, managers don’t know how to lead, their teams are remote, they don’t know how to converse with them, they’re struggling, massively struggling and there’s nothing really… we see a gap in that space to help teams.”