Company uses anonymized sensors to count in-office employees in the era of hybrid work.
Québec City-based GPHY has raised a $5-million CAD seed round to bring its workplace management app to clients outside of its home province.
GPHY (pronounced jee-fye) offers a combination of hardware and software products that allow companies to track physical office usage. Its flagship product, Elia, offers a real-time dashboard for managers to monitor statistics on office occupancy, including individual desk monitoring, and meeting room headcounts.
“Without precise occupancy data, [managers] cannot make good decisions.”
Myrik Hervieux-Gaudreau
GPHY
The all-equity, all-primary round, which closed in early September, was led by Vincent Thibault, co-founder of Québec City-based QScale. Several other Québec entrepreneurs supported the round, including Martin Bouchard, also a QScale founder, Alex Wojcik and Ismael Meskin from Kimoby, Ugo Cloutier from CFO+CO, Jason Dacosta from MSP Corp, and Pierre-Olivier DeSerres and Guillaume Falardeau from Leviat Legal. All of these investors participated individually with no involvement from their respective companies.
Québec investors Artopex, ACET Capital, and telecommunications giant Quebecor—through its venture capital arm asterX Capital—also made follow-on investments after supporting GPHY’s $2-million CAD pre-seed round, which closed in October 2022. This brings GPHY’s total funding to over $7 million CAD to date.
“One of the things our customers really like is the simplicity of the platform,” Myrik Hervieux-Gaudreau, GPHY co-founder and CFO, told BetaKit. “It’s really interesting for them to get real data from the occupancy of their workspace because after the pandemic, a lot of companies switched to hybrid work.”
Though the share of Canadians working fully remotely has declined since 2022, Statistics Canada reported that the proportion of hybrid workers more than tripled in 2023. Roughly thirty percent of parents with a child five or under had a remote or hybrid arrangement.
GPHY is pitching its Elia platform as a way to optimize office space for companies with hybrid arrangements through a comprehensive dashboard that extracts insights about how much square footage a business truly needs.
“Managers have to decide if they can reduce square footage,” Hervieux-Gaudreau said. “But without precise occupancy data, they cannot make good decisions.”
Lead investor Thibault believes competing products “fail to address the reality of hybrid workplaces,” because they do not capture whether office space is being over or under-booked relative to the size of a team.
“Elia solves both problems through an innovative fusion of hardware and software that dynamically tracks occupancy and utilization in real time,” Thibault said.
Elia’s revenue model relies on an annual subscription fee, plus recurring fees for hardware products, which include individual desk sensors, meeting room sensors, and interactive screens to display room booking schedules.
The sensors are anonymized, or in “ghost mode,” so they are not automatically associated with a person’s identity, the company claims.
“We cannot use the data we collect to decide how many hours a person must be paid,” Hervieux-Gaudreau clarified. “We measure the occupancy of the desks and the meeting rooms and that’s it.”
GPHY was founded in 2018 by four Laval University students: Anthony Blais, Hubert Audet, Pier-Etienne Lehoux and Hervieux-Gaudreau. The company name refers to the French translation of the physical engineering program its founders completed.
Most of its customers are based in Québec, including investors Quebecor and Artopex. In addition to refining their product, Hervieux-Gaudreau said the company wants to scale their sales into the rest of Canada and into the United States. He said they plan to fill three to five new roles on their sales and marketing team over the next three months, to expand their team of 16.
Other GPHY clients include some Québec public agencies, such as its public health agency, as well as the law firm Fasken and the accounting firm Groupe RDL, the company said.
According to the CFO, GPHY’s ultimate goal is “to become a unique solution for organizations to manage all their workplace needs, from access control to asset management.”
Despite an increasing share of companies offering a hybrid work model, some large tech companies, such as Amazon and Tesla, recently mandated that employees work in the office five days a week.
Hervieux-Gaudreau said he isn’t worried about the possibility of more full-time RTO mandates, and that he is confident GPHY’s services will be needed as hybrid work becomes the norm.
Feature image by Arlington Research via Unsplash.
