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Quan backed by YC to build employee well-being software


Quan, the female-led Dutch startup, has raised €1.03M in pre-seed funding from Y Combinator. A Netherlands-based impact fund and several unnamed angels also participated in the funding. Quan is an employee well-being software addressing one of the critical gaps in employment right now.

The unending nature of the pandemic, the shift to working from home, and the shortfall in skilled labourers have led to a situation where employees are reporting burnout at work. It has also led to employers losing talent easily and often unable to fill the position. Quan wants to address these very issues by putting emphasis on employee well-being.

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Quan: what you need to know

Based in the Hague, Quan was started by founders Arosha Brouwer and Lucy Howie and is the first female-led Dutch startup to be accepted into YC. The startup is building employee well-being software that aims to address the shortfalls of software measuring culture fit and people success platforms. The post-pandemic burnout is on the rise and Quan is more tailored to meet the employee needs of 2022.

The startup launched its beta product in March 2021 and according to Techcrunch, it is already working with 12 organisations. The startup has over 1,000 paid users with a platform engagement rate of 88 per cent. The founders say they researched the burnout issue with doctors, psychologists and therapists and identified more than 20 sub-dimensions of wellbeing underpinned by more than 200 predictors.

Arosha Brouwer and Lucy Howie say that employees don’t need another generic well-being perk and they believe that employees need guidance on which aspects of their well-being to focus on. The software is being pitched as a tool that can be used by individuals, teams and an entire organisation. The tailored application helps managers with practical guidance to optimise team performance while organisations get measurable and trackable insights to understand their well-being strategy.

“It’s been 2 years of focused effort to improve the world of work – so that we bring a higher degree of meaning, balance and consciousness to the daily activity we call work,” Brouwer says in her LinkedIn post.

Quan is now offering a free access trial for company leaders and Brouwer says “Quan is just getting started”. The startup is planning to have more announcements about the people and organisations it will be partnering with as it scales the software.

Arosha Brouwer, co-founder of Quan, adds, “For far too long, players in the people and culture platforms have been measuring ’employee engagement’ and ’employee experience’ without providing ways to effectively manage well-being and linking it directly to business metrics. Hence the reason why issues such as burn-out and toxic corporate cultures have been trending in the wrong way. Quan knows that to effectively fix a social problem we have to make it a financial problem (or incentive) too. The cold hard truth is we get companies to care about their employees when they can directly measure how it impacts their bottom line.”

Burnout as an occupational health issue

According to a survey by careers site Indeed, the work burnout got worse during COVID with more than half of the workers saying they felt burned out. The survey also found more than two-thirds of respondents said that the burnout got worse throughout the pandemic.

Now, the world is waking up to the issue and are preparing to address it. Sweden is still the only country to recognise burnout as a disease while the World Health Organisation has recognised burnout as an occupational phenomenon in 2019.

In the immediate aftermath of this recognition, employers like Nike, Bumble and others have offered their employees extra time off of work to support their mental health. But employers are yet to recognise burnout as a mental health illness and instead it is considered a mental health issue that needs to be treated as such in workplace environments.

The emergence of startups like Quan could result in a newfound meaning for employee burnout and organisations will finally have a tool to address this workplace issue. With more companies worried about the “Great Resignation” wave, it is now or never for employers around the world to address the issue.

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