Polywork, a new professional social network in invite-only beta, has announced that it has raised $13 million in Series A financing round led byA16Z with participation from the founders of Stripe, Instagram, Reddit, Behance, and Product Hunt. Caffeinated Capital, Goldcrest Capital; Bungalow Capital and Harry Stebbings’ 20VC and a number of high profile angel investors including Elad Gil, Nat Friedman, Anthony Pompliano and Ari Emanuel also participated in the round.

Polywork’s second round of funding comes just 3 months after it secured $3.5million in seed funding from Caffeinated Capital, Goldcrest Capital, and the founders of Paypal, YouTube, Twitch, and VSCO. 

Founded by Northern Irish Entrepreneur, Peter Johnston, Polywork is a professional social network that enables people to share highlights in a timeline format, blending both personal and professional updates. Polywork is trying to solve the problem that existing professional networks limit people to expressing themselves with their job title which means people can’t actually tell the story of what they really do or are capable of. Early adopters have described the social network as ‘Twitter meets LinkedIn’.

Polywork invites people to set up a profile and create badges to represent all the different aspects of their lives. Badges created range from professional ones like ‘Software Engineering’, ‘Product Design’ and ‘Marketing’ to personal, quirkier badges like ‘Rabbit Hole Voyager', ‘Lego Enthusiast’ and ‘Life Long Learner’. Polywork community members can then share highlights of what they’ve done, what they’re up to right now or what they’re planning to do in a timeline format - as well as follow other members. Two unique things about the new social network is that users can choose to have their Polywork profile on their own custom domain - and that the team made a conscious choice to not build any ‘systems of stress’ into the product, so there are no like buttons or visible follower counts - things that have typically turned other social networks into anxiety-ridden popularity contests.

The Series A funding will be used to increase the team from 15 to 25 people, investing heavily in product, design, engineering and data science. 

Peter Johnston, Founder, Polywork, comments: “We’re really excited to welcome Sriram and the wider Andreesen Horowitz team on board to help grow Polywork.” 

Johnston continued “Who we are as people and professionals is hard to confine to a single label -  the reality is our identities are much more complex and wonderful than that. We are empowering people to represent all the different things they do, both personally and professionally, inside and outside of their 9-5pm work. 

So far Polywork has resonated with professionals because it acknowledges and empowers people to represent all the quirks of being human. It’s been amazing to see people share highlights of the things they’ve actually accomplished at work while also sharing more personal updates like how they started homeschooling their children, travelled to a new city, or suffered from imposter syndrome.”

Sriram Krishnan, General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz comments: “The idea that your job title and your school are the most useful ways we identify professionals today is dated and thus so are many of the professional networks available to us. Professionals do such a wide variety of things inside their 9-5 job, and now outside of them too. An engineer can also be a podcaster, *and* an investor *and* a mentor - all at the same time. Polywork is reimagining what a professional social networking platform can look like. From helping people share all of the things they've actually done or are planning to do. Empowering people to represent who they are in a more fractional way is truly a unique take.”

Harry Stebbings, Managing Partner at 20VC comments ``I couldn’t be more stoked to back Peter and the team. It helps that he's a fellow Brit. It's been a long time coming that a new professional network emerged to replace LinkedIn. Polywork's focus on empowering people to tell their story and a more intimate view of their path in life so far resonated strongly with me - it's the first true version of a digital resume”

Mike Krieger, Co-founder, Instagram comments “Polywork is the professional social network that truly reflects the multifaceted nature of people and how they work on lots of things at once. They are filling a huge gap in the social network market today that there is no place to universally see what people are working on or simply how to see what types of things people want to collaborate on. It's arrived just at the right time to usher in a simpler, faster, more open way to share and collaborate with one another professionally.”