Yac

Yac is an asynchronous voice messaging tool for distributed teams founded in 2018. The tool provides high-resolution audio messaging and aims to accommodate meetings without interrupting the regular workflow of team members.

The motivation for Yac by its founders—Justin Mitchell, Hunter McKinley, and Jordan Walker–was  born out of their experience at SoFriendly (a product design and development agency). Within the firm and among client teams, they were privy to the deficiencies of synchronous communication. Therefore, the founders invented a product that can be described as middle ground between Slack and Zoom.

In January 2021, the company raised USD 7.5 million in funding, led by GGV Capital with participation from the Slack Fund. This round follows a USD 1.3 million seed funding round, led by Active Capital in January 2020.  The fresh funding will be funnelled into product development and boosting hiring across the go-to-market, product, engineering, and operations teams. The company reported more than a 400% increase in its user base due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

As of August 2020, Yac has over 5,000 users across 2,500 companies (April 2021) signed up for its service. Its early beta users included companies such as Hubspot, CBS, and Spotify. However, Yac’s main target market is startups in the tech space which are most likely to have a distributed workforce, including developers and designers.