Pod is a London startup founded by Luke Swanek and four other Londoners, all Western University graduates. Recentlyfeatured in Metro news, Pod is a TechAlliance client that’s making big waves- and it all started by the group deciding to build a tool that they wish they had for their own lives. Pod is described as an online organizational tool, created to organize and manage the people behind all manner of causes, teams, and clubs.
Users, especially the busy ones who find themselves entangled in multiple causes, clubs, and teams, can use Pod to segment out each facet in order to better understand the needs of each, with groups, sub-groups, discussions and a whole host of communication tools built in. Users are simply added into the groups, unsurprisingly called “Pods”, that apply to them.
From there, organizations can break out their members- say one big group for employees to collaborate and share ideas, and another host of smaller ones for individual projects and departments. Users are able to chat with each other and share valuable content like tasks and events. There is, perhaps naturally, a calendar to keep everyone on track.
The five Londoners have been aggressively pursuing their vision, living together as they develop the free cloud-based service, which launched in beta in September. This hustle has lead them to 1,000 individual signups and a $130,000 round of investment developed in the last 8 months. The project is devoted to London, and the startup says it has received a lot of support from Western and the city.
Blake Stone, Digital Media Business Analyst for TechAlliance, has been working closely with Pod as they’ve grown: “Pod came into TechAlliance about 5 months ago, and were in the process of launching the first iteration of their product to users. We have worked with Luke along the way, and I am happy to see that the platform is being used by so many organizations already.”
Pod is growing steadily- it sees great use on campus at Western, and was rolled out in some Toronto hospital departments over the summer, where other departments began adopting it through their own initiative. The startup has even had interest from the U.S. and abroad.
You can learn more about Pod and stay up to date with the latest developments by visiting their website.
