How a Zurich app connects employees around the world

Beekeeper now has five offices worldwide. How important is Zurich for you?

Cristian Grossmann: Zurich is the birthplace of Beekeeper. It is where we are still most widely represented after more than six years and where we currently have around 80 employees – and is therefore extremely important for us.

Zurich has developed in recent years into a true paradise for expats in terms of jobs. This can also be seen in our company: our skilled workers come from 34 different countries. This city is also well suited for our headquarters due to our proximity to ETH Zurich. Many employees in our engineering department are ETH graduates. To this day we still take part regularly in events and workshops there, either to make direct contact with potential talent or to assist and support students as coaches. We highly value the cooperation with the university.

The app was also developed in direct cooperation with local companies...

Yes, and in Zurich the willingness to innovate is generally very high, which benefited us when we started Beekeeper. What’s more, a large number of international companies have their headquarters or second head office in Zurich, putting us very close to our end customers while at the same time allowing us to learn from them.

What exactly is at the heart of the Beekeeper app?

It all started with the digitalization of the notice board. We realized that in many large companies communication with mobile employees takes place offline and, as such, with an extremely long time lag. As a result, many industrial employees were not properly informed. Besides this aspect of internal communications, we became increasingly aware that particularly for those employees without a computer workstation, it is next to impossible to make their day-to-day work more efficient without digitalization, for example optimizing processes. The opportunity to communicate via our platform, which we are continuously developing, makes an important contribution to this.

How do you see the Zurich tech startup scene in terms of your financial prospects?

Zurich’s tech startup scene has seen massive progress in terms of investment funds in recent years. In the meantime, investors are increasingly turning to Zurich because it has a very strong deal flow. This also means that many Zurich startups are now able to be active across Europe or even globally. If we remain on the same path as in recent years, we will be the next Zurich company to take its place on the world stage. 

About:

Cristian Grossmann founded Beekeeper in 2012 together with Flavio Pfaffhauser and is today its CEO. Grossman completed his doctoral studies in electrical engineering at ETH Zurich. Over the past three years, the two founders have raised $26 million from investors. Thanks to this growth, Beekeeper was included in the SaaS Index in spring 2018 as one of the world’s fastest growing companies in the Software as a Service (SaaS) industry. Clients include the Mandarian Oriental Hotel Group, Heathrow Airport and the Swiss retailer Globus.