CoTap, a new company created by former Yammer Chief Product Officer Jim Patterson and Senior Director of Engineering Zack Parker, today announced that it has raised a $5.5 million Series A round of funding that will accelerate the development of its workplace mobile messaging product.

With CoTap's workplace mobile messaging product, employees will be able to communicate faster and easier through short messages, similar to SMS, both one-on-one and in groups. Employees will be able to initiate new discussions and access all current conversations from their smartphones, tablets and desktops, creating a unified experience across all devices. CoTap will also provide security and compliance features to businesses looking to roll out a company-wide employee mobile messaging solution.

"SMS and mobile messaging have replaced phone calls and emails as the predominant way we communicate in our personal lives, but the workplace still lacks a dedicated tool for this type of communication," said Jim Patterson , CoTap founder and CEO. "CoTap's mission is to improve the way today's employees interact in the workplace by offering them a familiar, but business-centric option for exchanging short messages. With this new capital and our investors' seasoned experience, CoTap now has the necessary resources to deliver on this vision."

The Series A capital will be used to scale the engineering team to build out the workplace mobile messaging product. The round was led by Charles River Ventures, with participation from Emergence Capital Partners. In addition to the financing, George Zachary of Charles River Ventures and Jason Green of Emergence Capital Partners will be joining CoTap's board of directors.

"The use of smartphones in the workplace is still on the rise and soon text messaging will be one of the primary ways employees communicate," said George Zachary , partner of Charles River Ventures. "Jim and Zack's past experience at Yammer has primed them to understand modern workplace communication and bridge the gap between end users' and businesses' needs."

Availability

CoTap's workplace mobile messaging product will launch later this year, initially as native apps on iOS and Android. To find out more about CoTap and receive more information about the app's release, please visit www.cotap.com.

About CoTap

CoTap (www.cotap.com) is a San Francisco-based company helping employees communicate better by simplifying mobile communication in the workplace. Its new product provides a secure, business-oriented solution for mobile messaging in the workplace, offering a way for quicker communication to take place. The company's founders, Jim Patterson and Zack Parker , are both former Yammer executives and bring a deep background and skill set in mobile communication and enterprise software. CoTap aims to provide a secure and unified way for employees to communicate in today's workforce. CoTap's product will be available on iOS and Android later this year.