Progressly, a new platform for supporting growth within large enterprises, just got a big boost in both money and staffing. Ruslan Belkin, a former top exec from Twitter and LinkedIn will be joining the roughly two year old company. With the spotlight drawn, Progressly is taking the opportunity to formally announce a $6 million Series A, led by 8VC, as part of its official coming out party.
Progressly is developing a platform to facilitate the creation of transparent action plans so employees across large business can stay on top of new projects. The tool also provides convenient analytics to evaluate progress every step of the way and has a long term vision to enable businesses to not only share best practices internally, but share them externally with other businesses.
One way to think of Progressly’s open source vision is as Netflix for enterprise. Rather than a group plan allowing everyone in a massive company to indulge in binge watching Stranger Things, Progressly lets everyone in a company binge watch best practices.
While this may sound totally lame in comparison, if you take a moment to stop eating Eggo waffles, it’s actually an innovative premise. Here’s why — companies have been spending millions of dollars on creating open source libraries for developers to stay competitive in attracting and retaining top employees. Unfortunately, up until this point, there hasn’t really been a way to open source the business side of businesses. However, with new applications of the open source philosophy, concerns can emerge about its impact on competitiveness.
“It’s refreshing to hear how everyone wanted to talk about best practices,” said Nicholas Candito, co-founder of Progressly. “Ultimately it makes it easier for people to be indispensable to their organizations.”
On the ground, Progressly augments traditional platforms like Microsoft Sharepoint. The platform elevates the nitty gritty of business decisions into the limelight.
“Every company has a specific way they would approach a credit audit, but the great thing that communities do is make it easier to find the right answer,” noted Candito. “Progressly can be a megaphone for things that have done really well.”
The company is targeting enterprises in the financial services, energy and telecommunications sectors. These organizations tend to have a number of critical, non-technical workflows that are implemented with a top down structure. Progressly not only lets businesses organize their efforts, but creates a world where a company can look back and check the status of individual functional groups and evaluate how well new initiatives are progressing.
“Some of our investors were behind companies like Yammer,” added Candito. “It’s been a strong signal that companies are really hungry for things that drive collaboration, packaged it in a strategic way.”
Aside from supporting organizational leadership, the platform is brining some support to individuals on the front lines, responsible for sending emails and holding meetings. Just as Slack and Yammer bulldozed home grown and offline systems for communication and collaboration, Progressly hopes to do the same for business processes.