Pracuj Ventures Invests in Gamfi: A New Chapter

Adrian Witkowski

Gamfi has been around for 10 years and, like any business, we’ve had our ups and downs. It wasn’t until 2017 that we understood what we wanted to focus on: building a tool that lets any organization engage its employees through gamification mechanics. We also realized that, from a business perspective, engagement isn’t an end in itself, it should always translate into achieving a specific business goal. It’s not about employees having a great time; it’s about them finding genuine satisfaction in delivering their employer’s goals.

For three years we’ve focused relentlessly on exactly that. We’ve been developing a tool and a set of complementary services that, through a combination of dozens of gamification mechanics, help employees understand their employer’s goals and make achieving them genuinely enjoyable, so they do it more willingly, faster, and more effectively. We’ve gotten to know the needs of many organizations and learned how to gamify activities at every stage of the employee lifecycle, from selection and onboarding, through e-learning and training, all the way to hitting sales and production targets. We’ve optimized the tool itself and the implementation process so well that today, launching a project covering several thousand employees takes us just 3–4 weeks. Our client roster has grown to include InPost, T-Mobile, Wirtualna Polska, Volvo, and Wojas, among others.

The past few months were unexpected in many ways. The market context shifted, many businesses faced entirely new challenges and put decision-making on hold as they grappled with the new reality. Many of our sales processes were frozen, as companies suspended investment in new HR projects and focused on reshaping their existing ways of working into remote and hybrid setups.

After a few weeks, though, it turned out that to roll out these processes effectively, companies needed tools, and that our platform fits that need perfectly. We focused on deploying gamified onboarding and processes that smoothly move employees into office-free work.

We weren’t built to roll out hybrid work (no one was). We adapted a long-standing tool to the “new normal” because the market forced us to, and it forced us quite effectively! Today we can see that our gamified platform has become something of a bandage for post-pandemic wounds, with an even greater impact on businesses than we originally thought.

Behind us are months of intensive work, capped by an important milestone in Gamfi’s life. On September 17, 2020, we signed an investment agreement with Pracuj Ventures, the first corporate innovation fund in Poland and one of the first in the CEE region. The fund’s managing partners are Paweł Leks and Maciej Noga, the co-founders behind the success of the Pracuj Group. The fund focuses on investing in companies building technologies that support HR and learning & development.

For us, the Pracuj Ventures investment is a vote of confidence in our credibility. In the fund’s view, to quote Paweł Leks, Managing Director of Pracuj Ventures, we have a unique product with strong scaling potential, and we’ve built an effective business model. The experience and know-how the fund brings will let us scale our offering for employers even better.

What will the PV investment in Gamfi change for our current and prospective clients? The funds we’ve raised will allow faster development of our technology in an even simpler form for clients. We’ll move faster and more smoothly, and we’ll be able to focus, with greater peace of mind, on responding to the client needs we’ve been gathering and analyzing for several years.

We also plan to expand our work on building a community of current and prospective clients. We’ll ramp up activity around our recurring Engage! Labs, creating even more opportunities to exchange knowledge on how to use gamification across the employee lifecycle. And we’ll launch new educational initiatives that help companies build in-house gamification skills.

For me personally, the Pracuj Ventures investment confirms the path we chose three years ago, when I took the helm at Gamfi. We chose a hard, bold road of transformation, knowing exactly where we wanted to be years down the line. We worked quietly, consistently executing our plan to simplify and democratize gamification for companies. We agree this is the best moment to step out of the shadows.

Adrian Witkowski, CEO of Gamfi

P.S. If you have a problem to solve, disengagement in HR, or low motivation in sales and production, let us know here. We’ll help.