Mike Levinson knows first hand what it’s like to collaborate remotely with more than a dozen people trying to start a business. It was no easy task two years ago when he was starting Philadelphia-based DreamIt Ventures, which invests in early stage companies, and after looking at existing online solutions like Yahoo or Google Groups, he didn’t find any that had everything he needed.
That led Levinson and partner Mike Carson to start WizeHive, an online collaboration platform that allows group to share conversations, notes, tasks, calendars, files and other information in secure, private workspaces. Since rolling out an early version last fall, a story on TechCrunch increased the number of users tenfold and the highly regarded technology start-up blog has recently announced it will use WizeHive to help sort through the hundreds of applications it received for its annual global competition conference for start-ups, TechCrunch50.
The use of WizeHive as a tool to manage applications is one major selling point, something Levinson has used to whittle down the applications he gets for DreamIt, and institutions that handle a great deal of them, like universities and foundations, will likely be among WizeHive’s targets.
“We think the broad collaboration market is still young, but it will grow really fast, and we think we have the best product in the market,” says Levinson, whose company received $150,000 in funding from Ben Franklin Technology Partners in August. “We also think that the architecture underlying our system and its ability to create forms and applets and workflows gives us the ability to go beyond general collaboration and use WizeHive to collaborate around processes. That’s potentially a number of verticals.”
Levinson acknowledged the availability of similar platforms suited for large corporations, but feels WizeHive is better suited and more affordable for start-ups and small operations. WizeHive currently has about 1,000 active users who have entered roughly 7,000 tasks into the system. By this time next year, Levinson says the goal is to be on a profitable run rate and be identified as a top player in the broad collaboration space for small business users and freelancers.
“On a day to day basis, we’ve been pretty active and growing pretty rapidly,” he says.
Source: Mike Levinson, WizeHive
Writer: Joe Petrucci
