Irish-led Quorum secures $2m for ‘WhatsApp with community management’

Quroum, a Dublin-based start-up building a chat platform for creators and service providers to communicate directly to their clients, has raised $2m in seed funding. Founded in 2019 by Irish engineers Patrick Finlay, Romy Lynch and David Newell, the company has been described as “WhatsApp with community management built in”. Quorum said that the investment round will be used to grow its product team, with roles currently being based remotely, and accelerate the adoption of its subscription chat platform. “Micro-businesses are under added pressure to provide services digitally as a consequence of Covid-19, and we’re incredibly excited to make it easy for them to build a paid community,” said Finlay, who is Quorum’s CEO. Simple things like having no control over what kind of media was shared by participants, to bigger problems around privacy and participant data being accessible to all group members, make it a frustrating experience to try and host these conversations on other platforms.” Commenting on his firm’s decision to back the start-up, Adjacent’s Nico Wittenborn said: “Messaging is currently built around free – and eventually ad-supported – [global] communication.