Socially powered enterprise collaboration platform developer Incentive has announced it raised $1.7 million in a seed funding round.
Led by a group of institutional and private investors, this round of funding brings the company’s total funding to date to $3.5 million.
Incentive serves a range of industries and use cases, including oil and gas, technology and non-government organizations, including the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which is rolling out the platform to 10,000 employees in 28 countries.
“Platforms where all of a company’s intellectual property and knowledge is stored and shared should be as secure as a bank vault. Unfortunately, data leaks and breaches seem to be happening quite often in the cloud,” Rickard Hansson, Incentive’s CEO, told eWEEK. “Employees want the flexibility and mobility that comes with working with the cloud, but with so much internal data moving through the platform, security is imperative. This is why collaboration platforms need to look at single-tenant deployments, rather than multi-tenant.”
Hansson noted that Incentive is one such provider of a complete and secure socially powered enterprise collaboration platform that’s taking this approach.
“Whether on the cloud or on-premises, its single-tenant approach enables enterprises to meet regulatory compliance and mitigate risks,” he explained.
The platform is designed to make collaboration and intelligence sharing simpler and more secure by offering data privacy, protection and control of business information.
Its user-friendly, socially powered collaboration platform helps eliminate cluttered workflows by consolidating and standardizing existing apps and tools in a central location.
All content, whether a wiki, blog, document, instant message (IM) or video conversation, is centralized, making it accessible by every employee through intelligent search.
“Given the unique characteristics of today’s employees, a social collaboration platform like Incentive that makes it easy to work together and collaborate will encourage quick adoption,” Hansson said. “A socially powered collaboration platform equips the workforce with the tools and features they need to excel and be more productive, while simultaneously helping organizations navigate a rapidly changing employee base.”
The new funding will support and grow the company’s U.S. expansion, marketing and sales, as well as bolster its product development efforts, according to Hansson.
“A social interface is key to the adoption of any enterprise technology today. The Millennial generation will make up the majority of the global workforce within five years, and they are expecting the same tools at work that they use in their personal lives,” he said. “Businesses are seeing a shift in traditional workplace culture and technologies toward a more social business that leverages the best practices of social networks and apps.”
A platform that embodies the look and feel of social media networks that people are already used to enables coworkers to easily engage with each other through liking, commenting and sharing information, thus streamlining communication and collaboration, Hansson said.