Wheelings & Dealings: Social Collaboration Platform Provider Incentive Brings in $1.7 Million Seed Funding Round

By Laura Stotler
TMCnet Contributing Editor

Social collaboration is a pervasive form of communication and has proven valuable for customer service, sales and marketing and a host of applications. Incentive is a company that specializes in a socially powered enterprise collaboration platform aimed at both enterprises and mid-market sized organizations.

The company just got a major vote of confidence by raising $1.7 million in seed funding from institutional and private investors. The new money brings the company’s total funding to $3.5 million, and will be used to help grow its U.S. expansion efforts, including sales and marketing and product development.

The company already has thousands of users globally, with a focus on the oil and gas markets as well as technology and non-government organizations. NATO is one of Incentive’s largest customers and is rolling out the platform to 10,000 of its employees in 28 countries.

“This funding will help us better reach and service our customers, as well as take our product to the next level,” said Rickard Hansson, founder and CEO of Incentive. “We have recently made significant additions and upgrades to our social collaboration platform, including integration with SharePoint and Dropbox (News - Alert), and look forward to accelerating our product development.”

The company was also chosen by Microsoft Ventures as part of its global program of startups, with its solutions accessible by Microsoft (News - Alert) clients throughout the world. Incentive is the only social enterprise collaboration company in the program, with its platform offering secure and private collaboration and intelligence sharing. All apps and tools are accessible from a single location with centralized content, including documents, blogs, IM and video conversations.

Earlier this year, Incentive teamed up with technology consulting and software provider Technossus to market its platform to small and mid-sized businesses. The partnership enables Technossus clients to use Incentive’s platform, while Incentive will offer consulting and integration services from Technossus to its own clients. Technossus is also planning to use Incentive’s API to create custom applications as part of the collaboration.