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Digital Future Leads Investment Round in Rallyware

  • Written by: Yevhenia Dzyuba

Digital Future, a venture investment fund, has announced leading a US $675K Series Seed extension investment round in Rallyware, an intelligent workforce cloud engagement solution. The funding round was also joined by WannaBiz, Seattle-based Lighter Capital, and Nick Bilogorsky, a Silicon Valley angel investor. The company plans to use the new investment on building out its sales and marketing team to expand its growth into new market verticals.

“Rallyware is a stand-out example of successful, well-developed technology commercialization,” says Oleksii Vitchenko, CEO of Digital Future. “We have been very excited to verify that the service significantly improves engagement, productivity, and retention in enterprises facing the challenges of onboarding and training their large workforces. Rallyware has shown great growth potential to date, and I am really looking forward to seeing the team further realize its development perspectives for the company in the US and beyond.”

Rallyware plans to continue implementing its vision of becoming a go-to technology platform for any companies that can benefit from engaging their distributed workforces. With 28 employees across their San Francisco and Los Angeles (CA), San Antonio (TX), Salt Lake City (UT), Amsterdam (Netherlands), and Kharkiv (Ukraine) offices, the company has already doubled its revenues since last year and was able to attract such market-leading customers as Samsung Electronics, Mary Kay Cosmetics, Market America, and many others. Part of the proceeds of the round will go to expanding the offering for the existing customers as well as attracting the new ones.



George Elfond, CEO of Rallyware:
“Nowadays, many companies are changing their approach to work and personnel management. More and more employees are working remotely without being tied to a specific place and time. Classic engagement and motivation system are based on the presence of the supervisor who controls the work of their subordinates. In today's world, this approach is no longer viable. Based on the principles of motivation in social projects, we offer an enterprise solution that helps motivate, retain and continuously maintain the interest of staff in any workflow capacity, improving the quality and effectiveness of their work.”

Rallyware was initially designed to engage and motivate groups of people in non-profit social and political projects and has quickly grown to include many other commercial markets and use cases. The many examples of such markets include direct selling companies, sales organizations, membership networks, associations, volunteers for social and political campaigns, and others.

"Rallyware has a constant progress, they are good in b2b-sales and have several strong advisers," - says Artem Borodatyuk, Partner of WannaBiz, who met George during a visit to Silicon Valley. "There is also an important fact that the competence of all the founders of WannaBiz may be useful to Rallyware. As a marketing professional with a profound knowledge in the online and digital marketing areas, I see an opportunity to help the project with our expertise", adds Alex Bornyakov, Managing Partner of WannaBiz.

BJ Lackland, CEO of Lighter Capital: "Rallyware is addressing a very important and growing pain point of engaging distributed workforces for many enterprises. I have been following them since I first met George in 2014. The company has impressive revenue growth and the team has been incredibly disciplined about building a fundamentally strong high-growth business. We are very pleased to become a part of this exciting journey with them."

Digital Future has been quite active in 2016 and has invested in 9 companies this year. Early this month, the company invested US$1,7million in Attendify, a SaaS-based event platform. Early this year, Digital Future participated in a US$1 million funding round in tutoring platform Preply. Previously, it co-invested with others in a US$13,1 million funding round in YouAppi, which offers a mobile media buying platform.

 

About Digital Future

Digital Future is a venture investment company with a focus on AdTech, SaaS, Artificial Intelligence, eCommerce, IT Security domains. The company invests in the businesses from Central and Eastern Europe, primarily at a seed stage. Besides financing, Digital Future shares its networking, technical and marketing capabilities with its portfolio companies to facilitate scaling and penetration into global markets. For more information, visit www.digital-future.org/en/

About Rallyware

Rallyware is an intelligent workforce engagement solution. Rallyware first began at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with the core idea of automating and scaling engagement through technology. Rallyware empowers its customers across the globe, such as Samsung, Mary Kay, and many others, to coach, train, and motivate their people through personalized scalable engagement programs that achieve higher sales, faster employee onboarding, increased participation in corporate initiatives, and other business objectives. For more information, visit http://www.rallyware.com/

About WannaBiz

WannaBiz is an angel seed fund, focused on global projects in ad tech and SaaS with a steady revenue raise. WannaBiz targets seed stage, round A or bridge round startups with Ukrainian founders all over the world (especially: USA, UK, EU). Since all of the founders are involved in ads business, the online ads projects and ad networks have the opportunity to get the most of the expert support. For more information, visit wannabiz.com.ua

About Lighter Capital

Lighter Capital is an online revenue-based lender providing technology companies up from $50,000 to $2 million in growth funding. Using proprietary technology, Lighter Capital streamlines the loan process for entrepreneurs so they can stay focused on running their business and get the funding they need in 2 to 4 weeks. Based in Seattle, Lighter Capital works with companies across the US. For more information, visit https://www.lightercapital.com

 

Jos de Bruin COSBOA's 2016 small business champion

  • Written by: Zoe Guest
Kate Carnell, Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman, presents CEO of Master Grocers Australia (MGA), Jos de Bruin, with his Small Business Champion award at the Vodafone National Small Business Summit.
Kate Carnell, Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman, presents CEO of Master Grocers Australia (MGA), Jos de Bruin, with his Small Business Champion award at the Vodafone National Small Business Summit.


The CEO of Master Grocers Australia (MGA), Jos de Bruin, was named 2016 Council of Small Business of Australia (COSBOA)’s Small Business Champion at the Vodafone National Small Business Summit.

Jos was presented his award by Kate Carnell, Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman – a respected member of the small business community.

Paul Nielsen, Chairman of COSBOA, bestowed the honour to Jos for his dedication to small business and his work surrounding competition policy, in particular section 46, The Effects Test.

Paul said: “Jos is most worthy of the accolade of the COSBOA Small Business Champion for 2016 for the terrific work he did in marshaling 23 industry associations, representing 900,000 businesses, and other interested parties, together with government, to discuss the most necessary changes to competition policy recommended in the Harper Review.

“The implications of the changes to section 46 cannot be understated and will have far reaching effects for small business over the next 20 years.

“Jos works tirelessly to bring together the interest groups. COSBOA and small business owe him a great debt of gratitude.” 

Section 46, if enacted, will assist the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) to act quicker and regulate the behaviour of dominant businesses, which is to the detriment of the market.

Like COSBOA, Jos believes in a level playing field for businesses in Australia, which allows small businesses to compete with big businesses and in a fair environment.

Speaking about his award, Jos said: “I am thrilled to be awarded the COSBOA Small Business Champion award. I’m passionate about small business and seeing their futures protected. I hope all the work I and the businesses and associations I’ve worked with on the Effects Test are enacted upon sooner rather than later.

MGA Independent Retailers is a fast moving, agile and forward-thinking employer organisation supporting Independent Supermarkets, Liquor Retailers and Hardware Stores in Australia. As a national employer organisation, its role is to support employers with areas of their business that they may not have the time, money or resources to focus on.

To find out more about COSBOA, visit: www.cosboa.org.au

To find out more about the Summit, visit www.nationalsmallbusinesssummit.com.au

Hashtag: #NSBS16

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