Exclusive: EHI backs Blink with $17 million
Danny Meyer's PE fund, Enlightened Hospitality Investments, gives the growing workforce engagement app a hospitable shot in the arm.
The leaders of Blink, a digital employee experience platform, didn’t have plans to actively raise capital, but when a top hospitality investment firm spearheaded by an industry legend asked to invest, Blink founder and CEO Sean Nolan said yes... eventually.
Today, Blink is announcing a $17 million investment from Enlightened Hospitality Investments, the private equity fund tied to celebrated New York restaurateur Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group. Meyer was eager to invest in the company after he saw it in action at Shake Shack, the nearly 700-unit fast casual restaurant he opened as a single hot dog stand in 2001.
“We would not quit knocking on the door until you opened it,” he reminded Nolan during a recent joint interview exclusive to Expedite. (There’s some discrepancy about how long this process took, but those involved agree it’s a good match.)
Founded in London but now Boston-based, Blink builds communication tools that connect teams inside large organizations. It integrates others, like HR and payroll platform Workday, offering employees at companies including McDonald’s, Dollar Tree, and Domino’s Pizza a single mobile super-app to manage their work life. The app connects people across levels and locations at scale with group chat and other comms functions, giving workers a voice and sense of agency. Blink’s promise is that better understanding and communication, especially among a large and distributed workforce, will increase both worker satisfaction and customer experience and service. According to the company, its customers see up to a 26 percent reduction in frontline employee turnover.
Blink started outside of restaurants; it first served other service industries like transportation, healthcare, and logistics.
“But actually it’s in the quick-service and retail sectors where we’ve seen the most growth,” Nolan said.
It’s growing fast. Last year, Blink added some 700,000 users in the hospitality sector. Employee adoption of self-service tools like shift-swapping grew fourfold.
That’s in part because Blink understands how to engage a young and tech-savvy workforce.
For instance, company leaders can post short TikTok-style videos to share news and announcements or even live-stream inside the app to show off examples of, say, great customer service, smart store design, or a particularly engaging display.
“It doesn’t need to be perfect,” Nolan said. “Post that on the internal Blink, and that drives more sense of togetherness and belonging and transparency and authenticity inside the organization than any pre-prepared press release or statement or anything else.”
Admittedly, Blink does not have the algorithmic power nor entertainment value of a TikTok scroll session, though on average, workers open the app seven times per day. But if you want to engage a digitally native workforce, surfacing important info in a way they can easily understand and engage with it is the way to go.
“The best part about it is that the employees enjoy it,” Meyer said. “It doesn’t feel like it’s something being imposed upon them.”
Here’s another example: Recently, Nolan told me, an enterprise restaurant brand used Blink to introduce and hype a new menu item to restaurant workers across the country. Restaurant execs posted videos explaining the change and the philosophy behind it; the company introduced some friendly competition with an in-app game that tested employees’ knowledge of the new item and its ingredients.