Wazoku, a London, UK-based AI-powered innovation and idea management platform, raised £8.5 million in Series B funding from Octopus Ventures, with participation from existing investors including Calculus Capital.
Wazoku will use the funding to drive R&D across its product suite, as well as further internationalization, acquisitions, and the management of hyperscale growth over the next two years.
Wazoku has also announced the acquisition of the Danish collective intelligence platform, Mindpool, a research spinout that captures actionable employee insight to improve company performance. The acquisition, the company’s third in three years, extends the company’s collective intelligence offering, driving further insights, engagement, and predictions across the innovation at scale process. The
Mindpool team will join the Wazoku business as part of the transaction, extending Wazoku’s reach and presence even further in Denmark and across Europe.
“I've admired Mindpool as a business since its inception, and I’m obviously a champion of collective intelligence, so it's fantastic to be able to bring Mindpool into the Wazoku business," said Simon Hill, CEO of Wazoku. "It will be a valuable addition to our platform, combining human intelligence and technology to create a compelling proposition, offering actionable insight into company performance for all our global customers, and through our Innovation_360 suite, we can remove the friction and improve the success rates from insight to impact.”
Wazoku works with global enterprises such as NASA, Enel, HSBC, Shell, and more to help them innovate at scale.
Company: Wazoku Limited
Raised: £8.5
Round: Series B
Funding Month: September 2022
Lead Investors: Octopus Ventures
Additional Investors: Calculus Capital
Company Website: https://www.wazoku.com/
Software Category: AI-powered innovation and idea management platform
About the Company: Founded in 2011, Wazoku is an innovative SaaS business changing the world, one idea at a time. It provides solutions for idea management and open innovation, powered by its proprietary Challenge Driven Innovation® methodology for Innovation at Scale. Wazoku is both a for-profit and a for-purpose business, passionate about enabling organizations to engage and collaborate with their workforce, ecosystem, customers, and the world—to generate new ideas and turn them into impact. Its modular enterprise platform provides you with all the tools you need to power internal, external, and open innovation across your global organization. Wazoku's mission is to enable problem-solving at scale around the world: no matter how big or small the problem you’re dealing with. Wazoku empowers organizations such as Waitrose, HSBC, NASA, and AstraZeneca, as well as central/local governments and not-for-profits, to help them embed innovation as a core everyday capability and change the world, one idea at a time. Its open talent marketplace, the Wazoku Crowd, hosts millions of engaged and brilliant problem solvers and is the place for pioneering crowdsourced innovation. Wazoku is headquartered in London and has offices in Bristol (United Kingdom) and Dover, Delaware (USA).
Source: https://blog.wazoku.com/wazoku-raises-8.5m-in-series-b-funding-from-octopus-ventures-and-acquires-collective-intelligence-start-up-mindpool