Company to use funds to introduce its Riak Open SaaS Service to the market.
CAMBRIDGE, MA – April 8 – Riak Technologies, Inc., today announced it has conducted an initial close of approximately $2 million on a Series B Preferred investment round. The company will use the funds for general corporate purposes and to commence sales of Riak Open.
“This is an exciting accomplishment for Riak Technologies in an extremely difficult early stage investing environment,” said Earl Galleher, Chairman and CEO of Riak Technologies. “We are fortunate that Angel Investors are continuing to apply risk capital to good business models that solve real market problems.”
Riak’s Series B Preferred round is being led by Harbor Island Equity Partners, LLC of Wilmington, North Carolina. Participating along with Harbor Island is the Wilmington Investor Network (WIN), an angel investment group of highly accomplished entrepreneurs, also of Wilmington, North Carolina. With this funding Riak is adding two new Board Members, Carlos Parajon, Managing Partner of Harbor Island Equity Partners, and Scott Sullivan, Manager of Cameron Management, LLC and a WIN member.
“We are very excited to make this investment and to work with Riak to build a great business,” said Mr. Parajon. “The management team has a great track record of building successful Internet businesses, including Akamai Technologies, and their technology solutions are truly innovative and easy for enterprise customers to use.”
In January 2008, Earl Galleher and Tony Falco, co-founders of Riak Technologies, invested $1.3 million of their own capital in the company. They hired a world-class developer team to finally apply software and science to the problems faced by management and sales people trying to improve and measure the enterprise sales process and to make it repeatable and efficient. Mr. Galleher was previously Executive Vice President of Akamai Technologies from its incorporation in 1998 through mid-2001. Mr. Falco headed the technical sales engineering, customer provisioning and ongoing customer support organization, reporting directly to Mr. Galleher at Akamai. Together, they brought Akamai’s services to market, grew the sales and support organization from 0 to 650 employees, grew revenue from $0 to $165 million annualized, and expanded operations to 17 offices throughout the US and Europe. Prior to Akamai, Mr. Galleher was President of DIGEX, Web Site Management Services. Mr. Falco worked with Mr. Galleher at DIGEX as well. At DIGEX, Galleher established the world’s largest Enterprise Web Site Hosting company. After the DIGEX IPO, the company was acquired for $178 million in June 1997. Today, DIGEX Hosting is a successful unit of Verizon Business Services.
“Tony and I have a long history of selling into and supporting large enterprise customers,” continued Galleher. “We understand the challenges faced by an enterprise sales organization that is under pressure to meet numbers, report on their activities to executive management, and to accurately forecast what will happen at the end of a period. We have always been frustrated by the lack of software tools that really help sales people sell more, more efficiently. So, we decided to start Riak Technologies to solve these obvious problems. Our tools, deeply integrated into all major CRM systems will provide enterprises with a very strong platform to manage the full life cycle of a deal from lead to prospect to customer.”
Prior to a reincorporation in January 2008, Riak Technologies, Inc. was Riak Strategies, a professional services sales training services company incorporated in 2002. From 2002 through 2007, Riak Strategies provided sales training services to hundreds of large enterprises, including Symantec Corporation, Dow Jones, Forrester Research, Sun Microsystems, Agilent, SAP, etc. In January 2009, Riak Technologies restructured its training services business and engaged Kensei Partners to be the Authorized Reseller of its training services. With this change, Riak has been able to continue making award-winning training services available to its customers, while focusing 100% of its resources on building its technology solutions. Kensei Partners was formed in January 2009 by the top Riak Sales Trainers.
About Riak
Riak Technologies, headquartered in Cambridge, MA, leads the industry in sales tools and services that combine automation of tasks with powerful analytics. Riak applies proprietary machine learning algorithms to data captured from thousands of client engagements to produce powerful insights and real-time guidance. These analytics provide a set of objective and rational metrics that inform every aspect of the sales process. The first of these tools, Riak Open, will be introduced to the market in Q2 of 2009.
Riak Open is the first of its kind, an application that automates the entire prospecting process – from researching leads and target accounts to composition and delivery of highly personalized messages to executives – all while instantly updating CRM.
Riak Open then analyzes each action to determine what, and who, generates the best results, constantly refining and improving the prospecting process for individuals, teams, and all users.
Riak Open not only improves the deal cycle; it provides invaluable executive insights about revenue, sales, and ROI. Riak customers work smarter and focus on deals that have a high probability of closure, all the while informing the metrics of the sales pipeline with every activity, every response and every closed deal.
Riak Open is now listed on the Salesforce.com AppExchange and will be available for other CRM systems in Q2 2009.
Riak Technologies also provides award-winning sales training through its Authorized Training Services Reseller, Kensei Partners. To learn more about how Riak Technologies can accelerate your deal cycle at www.riak.com or call 617.714.1700
