Armed with several high-profile international clients, including such names as Philips, Microsoft, Youtube, BNP Paribas, Blablacar and many more, Agorize have closed a €2 million round with Iris Capital and Capnamic Ventures. Agorize’s principal goal is to enable companies to tap in to the potential offered by communities to help them in the ideation process.
Agorize have already built up a number of communities around specific profiles, including students, engineers, and startups. Their community network is quite extensive as 2k universities are already involved in their challenges. Agorize will then work with companies to help them design specific challenges for these communities. In the past, most companies would have relied on market research help inform innovation, which is often more useful for gathering data about particular segments/audiences or testing specific concepts rather than directly generating ideas.
They have range of community oriented ‘mini-platforms’ around specific areas to facilitate specific challenges, including Studyka (student challenges),Hackateam (online hackathons), and UpWeStart (dubbed the The Missing Link between Startups and Corporations). They also offer a white label solution for customized challenges. The cost of launching a challenge for companies ranges between €10k-€100k. However, as Agorize handles the challenge end-to-end which is a big advantage over the cost and headache of having to organize a similar effort or analyze and interpret survey results themselves.
Of course, Agorize’s approach also has a lot of potential in other areas including recruiting as well as social marketing.