Kindling is a B2B software company that enables sharing of ideas, facilitates problem-solving, and optimizes cross-team collaboration. It’s used by a wide range of clients, from early-stage startups to multinational corporations, including Etsy, BBDO, and CEMEX. Originally developed for enterprise organizations, Kindling has found significant traction among teams of all sizes through its highly scalable, easily deployed, zero-training idea management offerings. Now, with funding from Lighter Capital, they’ll scale their sales and marketing efforts to businesses of all sizes.
Incorporated in 2011, Kindling is a spin-off of Arc90, which also created the well-known reading platform Readability. The NY-based company will leverage the new capital to hire additional sales reps, account managers, and marketers to help drive and sustain the company’s aggressive growth.
“I’ve been impressed with the speed and convenience of the Lighter Capital process,” says Kindling CEO Tim Meany. “For a rapidly growing enterprise software company between funding rounds, Lighter Capital’s structure is a great asset. It gives us access to capital precisely when we need it—to help drive growth. I’ve already introduced some of my peers at similarly-staged companies to Lighter with a strong recommendation.”
Kindling takes innovation program participants through a four-step ideation and collaboration cycle—discovery of opportunities and problems, discussion of ideas, evaluation of submissions and concepts, and transparent decision-making—to determine which ideas are opportune and timely. Through an interface that makes contribution intuitive for users on any device, Kindling maximizes user engagement while still providing powerful and transparent organizational and evaluation tools to the innovation program’s managers.
“We believe that Kindling has a unique product to enable companies to better collaborate internally,” says Lighter Capital Chief Investment Officer Molly Otter. “In fact, we are planning to test it ourselves as we hope to use it to improve the communication between our underwriting team and technology team to discuss new products and processes that will benefit our clients.”
Learn more about Kindling, watch a 3-minute video on how it works, or follow them on twitter @Kindlingapp.