Balloon, a San Francisco, CA-based insight mobility platform, raised $2.1m in seed funding.
The round was co-led by Jason Calacanis’ LAUNCH and Wavemaker Partners with participation from Imagination Capital, Luma Launch, Streamlined Ventures, XFactor Ventures, Matt Mullenweg, and others.
Led by CEO Amanda Greenberg and CTO Noah Bornstein, Balloon provides a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that enables companies, including Capital One, Thumbtack, Google, US Cellular, and the LA Angels, to share, collaborate, and vote on input anonymously. In doing so, the platform’s streamlined workflows eliminate costly biases (e.g., groupthink, anchoring, over-communication), increases thought diversity, and amplifies the strongest insights.
The core features of the platform include:
– Flights: To kick off, employees are asked to participate in a flight, which is a question or set of questions with a start and end time. Flight authors can choose from a library of flight templates based on specific use cases and functions.
– Balloons: Employees anonymously create and launch “balloons” with their feedback, responses, or information for each flight. Employees do so at their own pace and without visibility into other responses to avoid anchoring bias.
– Collaboration: After employees submit their balloons, the balloons are visible to everyone to anonymously ask questions or provide additional feedback on balloons.
Pumps: Employees can anonymously provide their vote or support to a particular balloon by giving it a “pump.”
– Results: When the flight is over, the balloons are scored based on the number of pumps and overall approval. The ranked results indicate group priorities, buy-in, and consensus for each balloon.
FinSMEs
11/12/2019