The Covid-19 pandemic, with its by-product of social distancing to help reduce the spread of infection, led to many organizations working in a far more distributed way than they had in the past, and that put a big spotlight on how well companies collaborated and communicated -- not just under the circumstances, but as part of their deeper culture. Today, one of the startups building communications tools that saw a big boost in business as a result of that trend is announcing a large round of funding, underscoring its success in filling that need. Staffbase, which helps internal teams craft, send out and measure the impact of their communications with their organizations, has raised $115 million in funding, a Series E that catapults the company's valuation to $1.1 billion.

The funding comes on the heels of the company reaching 2,000 enterprise customers, covering some 13 million workers in all.

General Atlantic led the round with Insight Partners also participating (the pair respectively led and participated in the startup's previous round a year ago). Staffbase will be using the funding to continue building out more integrations and functionality across its product -- with a specific focus on integrating Microsoft's full 365 suite -- as well as continue expanding its business overall from its base in Chemnitz, Germany.

There are dozens of tools in the market today built in the name of workplace communication and collaboration -- which itself has quickly become a huge and somewhat nebulous category in the area of enterprise IT. They include the likes of Slack and Teams for chatting or sharing files, Asana for project management, Zoom or Google Meet for video collaboration, Airtable for sharing and collaborating around spreadsheet style templates; dozens of apps aimed at frontline workers (one recent biggie on the fundraising front is Connecteam, which raised $120 million earlier this month), and more.

Staffbase sits both alongside but distinctly separate from these various tools. Martin Böhringer, its co-founder and CEO, tells me that part of its unique selling point lies in the fact that its primary customer target the internal communications team, which is not typically the primary focus for any of those other tools.