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
