Two-year-old Appynest Inc., which does business as Butterfly, believes that there’s need for a new approach to collecting employee feedback in the enterprise.

To fill this perceived gap, the startup has raised $2.4 million in funding via a seed round announced today. Butterfly offers a cloud service that enables companies to gather input from employees without hassling them with the lengthy and often monotonous feedback forms traditionally used for the task.

Instead, the startup relies on so-called pulse surveys. These are short polls that the startup says can be completed in as little as 30 seconds. They’re administered via services such as Slack and Office 365 to reduce the interruption to workers, who are spared the trouble of opening a new tab.

Butterfly’s approach has two potentially big advantages over traditional feedback gathering methods. First, the fact that its pulse surveys take fairly little time to complete means workers are often more likely to take them. Second, this convenience factor can make it feasible for companies to check up on employee sentiment more frequently than they otherwise could.

The result is, in theory, a more accurate view of the workforce. Butterfly visualizes the data gathered through surveys in a graphical dashboard that seems to borrow a page from business intelligence tools.

Companies can see how their employees feel about various issues, as well as track the way sentiment evolves over time. The dashboard’s features lend themselves to a variety of situations. A division head, for example, may wish to view if staffers’ job satisfaction has gone up or down in the wake of a major event such as a change to the organizational structure.

Butterfly counts corporate giants such as General Electric Co., Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Citgroup Inc. among its clients. The startup plans to invest the new funding in further widening the appeal of its service.

The round was led by a French fund called Daphni with participation from Tectonic Capital and Precursor Ventures. Several angel investors chipped in as well.

Image: Butterfly