Crowdcast raises $6M to tap the wisdom of your workforce

Crowdcast, a startup that helps companies make better decisions by harnessing the knowledge and opinions of their employees, just announced $6 million in new funding from Menlo Ventures.

San Francisco-based Crowdcast provides what it calls “social business intelligence.” Instead of pulling its information from a company’s different applications and datasets like traditional business intelligence, Crowdcast is all about finding the knowledge in your workforce. Managers can ask their employees to make forecasts about the company and its products — after all, those employees may have the best idea when things are going well, and when there are problems ahead.

One obvious example involves the date when a product will be ready to ship. Not only will Crowdcast give companies warnings when products are likely to miss their deadlines, it also gives them the date when team members really think the product will ship.

One problem with this approach is that each workers’ expertise differs from question to question. But Chief Scientist Leslie Fine said, “We let the market decide.” Users not only make predictions on what they think will happen, but they can indicate their level of certainty by how specific their prediction is, and by how much of the application’s virtual currency they’re willing to bet. And although individual predictions are anonymous, managers can see how they vary between departments and teams.

Companies can offer rewards to the Crowdcast participants who are the most valuable, namely those who make frequent, early, and accurate predictions.

There aren’t many direct competitors yet, according to founder and chief executive Mat Fogarty. The closest is probably Streamwork from SAP. But there’s definitely a chance more traditional enterprise software makers might try to add similar features, or that newer business collaboration companies might do the same. In fact, Fogarty said one of Crowdcast’s big goals is to start integrating with other social media and collaboration products.

“It can’t be standalone,” he said.

Alsop Louie Partners, which provided Crowdcast’s $2 million seed funding, also participated in the new round.

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