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This week private social intranet service Incentive announced its expansion to LA as its first office in the US thanks to a $1.8 million angel round.
With the cash, the Incentive team will double its sales force in the U.S. to put “full focus on making sure the business scales,” Rickard Hansson, who founded the company in Malmo, Sweden, said.
Incentive started in 2008 to protect an SMB’s business information while improving its productivity. Today, it's offered as a downloadable software suite with activity streams, blogs and apps hosted securely behind a firewall or in a company’s private cloud (or as a SaaS solution for those who do not have an infrastructure or a private cloud).
“With our suite of social collaboration tools, companies know exactly where their data is, instead of having it be managed in a public cloud,” Hansson said in a statement Monday. “Employees can discover information significantly faster often saving an entire work day per employee per week. That means less time wasted looking for information and more time to get work done.”
In fact, if workers use social technologies, companies increase productivity by over 20 percent, the release said, pointing to a McKinsey study. This productivity spike is why Hansson and his team do what they do: “We are excited about the way we can change the way people work within companies and make it more efficient and frictionless.”
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