As distributed teams start to take over the world, more and more companies need to exchange ideas and brainstorm with their remote employees. Video calls and chats are simply not enough for gathering resources and conveying meaningful ideas. That’s why four former Skypers from Estonia created Deekit – an online whiteboard for remote collaboration that allows for real-time writing, drawing, and mind mapping.
The whiteboard is designed to work on any device – be it a laptop, a tablet, or a mobile phone. All users can write on the whiteboard in real time, adding their notes, drawings, images, or even rich media files such as spreadsheets. After they are done with the whiteboard, they can save it and add a detailed description to make it easy to find.
“What makes us different from our competitors is we are built to work on any internet connection,” explains Blake Moore from Deekit. “We want to empower emerging markets and have been careful not to induce huge requirements on connections. Everything is streamlined to work from wherever you are.”
Apart from over 30 tools incorporated into their product, Deekit offers an impressive library of ready-to-go templates for all teams to work on. They include most popular marketing and sales tools, such as business model canvas, brainstorming templates, doodling tutorials, or even coloring pages.
Additionally, the Deekit team encourages other uses of their platform – not only as a whiteboard for professional teams but also as an educational tool. They offer a special pricing plan for those who wish to use this tool in nonprofit organizations or educational programs.
All four founders of Deekit are former Skype employees. Kaili Kleemeier, the CEO, was previously the Operations Lead at Skype. She is an expert in networking, building payment systems, managing incidents, and constant change. Kristo Magi, the CTO, is a former infrastructure Architect/Strategist at Skype – he has led the way on several crucial projects in Skype’s history. Erki Esken was previously Head of Prototyping at Skype. He is a design aficionado with a strong development background. Asko Tamm, the fourth founder, has twelve years of system design and administration experience, including seven years at Skype.
Deekit was founded in 2015 and has been growing steadily since then. The company has raised over 540,000 USD funding in two seed rounds, the latter of which took place in January 2017. They have a fully working product with 30,000 registered and 2,000 weekly active users and continue to scale up. Their main focus is adding new functionalities to the product – they have tons of ideas for new features and are excited to implement them in the nearest future.
