Quebec City’s Crowdbase Gets $650,000 in Funding

By: Kevin Green  |   October 2nd, 2012   |   Business, News, O Canada, Social Media

Canadian startup, Crowdbase, made public late last month that it had successful gained $650,000 in funding. The cash injection for the knowledge management company came from venture capitalist firms Real Venture, iNova Capital and angel investor Martin-Luc Archambault.

 

Crowdbase wants to help enterprises by creating a social knowledge platform that marries a social network with knowledge management tools. This platform will help companies organize, index, and share knowledge across their entire enterprise. Crowdbase thinks that the tools it provides will make the sharing of knowledge and synergistic collaboration within organisations much easier.

 

The start up plans to use the fresh cash to acquire new talent and also add more features to their service.

 

Albert Dang-Vu, the founder of Crowdbase, explains that he got the idea for his new business when he was working at another start-up called Mirego. The company was a mobile tablet app development firm and Albert noted that he was having issues training employees and sharing with them the knowledge that current employees possessed. At the time, he built an application in house to help solve the issue but realized that it had a broader appeal and left Mirego to setup Crowdbase.

 

Dang-Vu explains the Crowdbase system and the problems it solves when he states that, “Helping people ask questions was a big challenge for new employees, because people were working from home, sending emails and we wanted to reduce the overload of email. By using Crowdbase, you can send questions from your iPhone, from the platform with answers right away, but mostly organize that content into topic pages so it’s not only in the status feed like enterprise social networks.”

 

Crowdbase allows employees and staff to add links to articles which are then run through the platform’s algorithm and displayed as suggested links based on topic. This allows archiving content against specific topics easier and far more user friendly. The system also lets users to post notes, documents, images and ideas about a topic so that everyone has access to that knowledge within the firm. Crowdbase also offers a Question and Answer sections where employees can post problems which experts within the firm can answer. All this data is used to figure out who within the organization is an expert in what area. This helps other employees know who to approach when they need answers or advice on different topics.

 

Dang-Vu adds that, “We help people organize information with suggestions on where to categorize content, and from there, we analyze all interactions between users and the users and content to build a knowledge graph and a expertise graph. We’re then able to suggest people that this might interest them, or you might want to talk to this person to learn more.”

 

Crowdbase is free for now and is looking to get large organizations to accept and use its platform. The firm will be adding a paid feature in the near future. The biggest issue for the start-up is convincing companies to move away from other services like Google Drive or Dropbox which allow firms to store documents in the cloud for all employees to use. Competitors like Yammer who also offer enterprise social networks will also represent a challenge.

 

Source: BetaKit