EX-SERVICENOW EMPLOYEES LAUNCH SOFTWARE STARTUP, RAISE $400,000
Two former employees of the tech giant ServiceNow have launched a software startup in San Diego that’s riding a wave of new, pandemic-related business. And the startup has caught the eye of ServiceNow’s former executives.
The new company, called SerenityEHS, just raised $400,000 from investors to grow its operations. Among its investors are two exServiceNow executives, including Craig Pratt, the company’s former global vice president of product line sales. The round was led by Naked Capital Group.
SerenityEHS is making software that helps companies manage environmental, health and safety
concerns, like filing regulatory paperwork, managing inspections, and reporting safety incidents.
“When the pandemic hit, it made all these organizations re-evaluate their health and safety capabilities,” said Kris Markham, who co-founded the startup with Peter Oneppo. “They’ve now put health and safety on the top of their priority list.”
Markham said companies who have COVID-19 cases or outbreaks among their ranks need to follow certain processes, including some paperwork required by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).
“OSHA requires you to gather information and report it in a certain amount of time,” Markham said. “We help companies manage that, and report to the regulatory body.”
Markham says the startup already has paying corporate clients, but would not disclose further details.
The SerenityEHS software lives on the ServiceNow platform, which is already used by thousands of large corporations, including most Fortune 500 companies.
“Companies are looking for an EHS solution on ServiceNow, and we’re the only one on there,” Markham said. “That’s why we’re seeing so much growth.”
In a city better known for things like computer chips and wireless systems, ServiceNow is one of precious few software giants that was founded in San Diego. First launched in Solana Beach during the aftermath of the dot-com bust, ServiceNow was one of the earliest to the cloud software trend and is now valued at over $95 billion. They built a softwareas-a-service platform for the world’s largest corporations to manage their IT help requests online.
Today, ServiceNow is more like an operating system (like Windows) for enterprise-grade cloud applications. Other companies build business-grade software and apps for the platform. In fact, several exServiceNow employees have left the corporate giant to launch their own ideas on their former employer’s platform. Local startups DotWalk and NewRocket fall in this category.
Markham sold his last startup, Intreis, to ServiceNow back in 2015, making it one of the earliest acquisitions of the tech giant. He then joined ServiceNow for more than four years, where he held various leadership roles in sales and project management.
His co-founder, Oneppo, was formerly a venture manager at ServiceNow’s future products team, NowX.
They employ one engineer at SerenityEHS and has plans to onboard a project manager soon. They expect to use their new funds to scale up the product and deliver on the business they’ve already signed, Markham said.