Yammer competitor Jostle.me has raised $3.1 million from a group of angel investors. The company has raised $4.6 million to date, all from private individuals. It has 52 shareholders, including most employees who work for the company and its directors.
Jostle sells a cloud-based enterprise platform that uses photos of the people in the organization as the foundation for the service. Immediately its differentiation is apparent to a service like Yammer, which uses the standard river of news for collaboration. With Yammer, updates flow down the page.
Jostle is a new kind of social platform for the enterprise that forgoes long rivers of text for a landscape of pictures that frame the company in the context of the relationships that people have.
The images can be filtered in a variety of ways: by name, role, skill and other criteria. Click on a photo and the profile comes into view, displaying tags that tell something about the person. Tabs provide a bio, how to get in touch with the person and contributions they’ve made to different projects.
Visualization is what binds Jostle.me. You can view activities that are popular across the organization and how people relate to each other.
Jostle prides itself on its unconventional fundraising practices, opting for attracting a large group of individuals who come from the business profession. The company points out that 84 percent of its investors come from a risk profession, such as property development, medicine or oil and gas.
That’s an unconventional approach for a company that has an unconventional way of growing its business.