Badgeville, The Behavior Platform, Raises $25M Series C Round

MENLO PARK, Calif., May 30, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Badgeville, The Behavior Platform and global gamification leader, today announced it has closed a Series C round of venture financing. The round was led by InterWest Partners with participation by prior investors and brings Badgeville's total financing to $40 million in just 20 months since its launch. As part of this latest round, the company welcomes InterWest General Partner Doug Pepper to its Board of Directors.

"Badgeville solves an increasingly important business need: helping the enterprise understand and influence user behavior across every digital touch point. By providing a true Platform-as-a-Service solution, the company has quickly become the leader in gamification -- and also an unparalleled innovator in how businesses should approach user engagement, employee efficiency and customer loyalty," said Pepper, who also serves on the board of several SaaS companies including Marketo and Spredfast. "Badgeville has all the indicators of a successful SaaS company: a highly-sophisticated platform, a world-class management team and a growing market."

Gartner Research estimates more than 70 percent of Global 2000 organizations will have a gamified application by 2015. A separate industry firm, M2 Research, reports the gamification market will reach $2.8 billion in U.S. by 2016.

Launched in September 2010, Badgeville enables world-class businesses to measure and influence user behavior. It is the most versatile and powerful gamification platform, serving virtually every industry including technology, retail, healthcare, financial services, hospitality, education and employee performance management.

Badgeville's clients utilize its cloud-based platform to grow engagement, increasing adoption of their customer- and employee-facing user experiences. This platform infrastructure brings Badgeville's world-class database into a private, cloud environment, ensuring enterprise-class security and scalability.

"Badgeville has rocketed from its company launch and Series A funding all the way to a Series C funding in a mere 20 months, far faster than most SaaS companies," said Jeff Crowe, General Partner, Norwest Venture Partners, who led Badgeville's Series B investment and participated in this round.  "Investors, ourselves included, are excited about both the large untapped market opportunity and the rapid progress that Kris and team have made in staking out the leadership position in the Behavior Lifecycle Management space."

Leading this market, in less than two years, Badgeville has:

• Built the largest global client roster of more than 165 customers, including Oracle, EMC, Deloitte, Dell, Samsung, CA, NBC, The Walt Disney Company, Universal Music, Recyclebank, oPower, Fox, Vevo, Barnes & Noble, eBay's X.commerce, Panera Bread, Rogers Communications, Bell Media, The Active Network, Danone, Ford, along with a Top 3 global technology and a Top 5 financial services company in the world.
• Created the world's first and only Behavior Platform, expanding gamification from a siloed user experience into a world-class Platform-as-a-Service technology, which enables a company to measure and influence user behavior across all of its websites, mobile sites, and full suite of enterprise applications.
• Launched the industry's leading "Cloud Connector" program, with integrations for Yammer, Bazaarvoice, Klout, Sharepoint, IBM Connections already live and deployed, and Salesforce.com and Jive Software in private beta with select customers.
• Scaled to support companies globally in more than 18 countries and dozens of multi-national Fortune 1000 businesses.
• Expanded into London, Austin and New York to provide regional service hubs for its rapidly growing client base.
• Launched the industry's first ISV program. Industry leaders embedding Badgeville into their core technology offerings to make them more engaging include Oracle, Kaiser Permanente's Avivia Health, and Saba.
• Created the most comprehensive partner network across the gamification industry, with partnerships including Bazaarvoice, Janrain, Yumemi, Livefyre, Echo, Live Gamer, Razorfish, Salient6, Peoplebrowsr and Cloudsquads.
• Earned numerous industry recognitions, including being named a Forbes Top 100 Most Promising Company in America, a Gartner "Cool Vendor in Social CRM," OnDemand Top 100 and TechCrunch Disrupt Audience Choice Winner.
• Received patents and recognition for its award-winning technologies, including the Behavior Engine, Dynamic Game Engine, Reputation Mechanics and Social Mechanics.
• Launched the industry's only Gamification Frameworks, the combination of best practices, behavioral psychology and social game design expertise, visualization, technology and deployment automation that enables world-class companies to be live with sophisticated behavior programs in weeks, not months.
• Helped customers achieve real business results across customer and employee experiences, including 500 percent increase in user comments, 140 percent growth in time on site, 60 percent increase in employee engagement, 80 percent jump in user registrations, 600 percent gain in shop clicks, 250 percent growth in training compliance and 2000 percent surge in social shares.
• Grown its team to more than 70 employees in four offices around the world, with team members from companies including Salesforce.com, American Express, Zynga, Lithium Technologies, Amazon, Cisco's WebEx, Electronic Arts and IBM.
• Skyrocketed to become the world leader in gamification deployments, focused on consumer, employee, developer and partner audiences. Badgeville is the only company with deep expertise across all these audiences within the Fortune 1000.

"InterWest Partners brings a wealth of experience in high-growth Software-as-a-Service, and we look forward to their strategic assistance in our continued global expansion," said Kris Duggan, CEO of Badgeville. "Our momentum is a testament not only to explosive market demand for gamification and behavior management solutions, but also to our team, our platform approach that delivers real business results, and, most importantly, to our valued customers and partners who are innovating what it means to be a social business."

About Badgeville

Badgeville, the Behavior Platform, makes it easy for business leaders to measure and influence behavior across customer, partner, developer and employee communities. The leading provider of SaaS enterprise gamification solutions and services, Badgeville's global client roster features the world's most innovative enterprises across virtually every industry, including Samsung, Recyclebank, Deloitte, Dell, eBay, Universal Music, The Active Network, and more. Founded in 2010, Badgeville is based in Menlo Park, Calif., and has offices in New York and Europe. For more information, visit Badgeville on the web at http://www.badgeville.com

SOURCE Badgeville