Deal highlights

• SaaS platform to improve enterprise collaboration and decision-making by removing costly biases and surfacing anonymous ideas and feedback.
• Annual SaaS subscriptions with BMW, Capital One, Thumbtack, LA Angels, and others. Upcoming paid pilots with Google and Airbnb.
• $250k Annual Recurring Revenue; $1M in projected expansions with current customers; $3.4M inbound sales pipeline.
• Dartmouth-Carnegie Mellon founding team. CEO is a public health researcher and designed national behavior change campaigns for government agencies.
• $765k raised to date from Wavemaker Partners, 500 Startups, DreamIt Ventures, and others.
• 500 Startups Batch 19 Alumni
• Featured in CNN, The Ringer, Crunchbase, Bloomberg, among others.

Bad data and decisions cost businesses billions.

Our business tools and processes – collaboration tools, meetings, surveys, emails, etc. – are broken. They don’t address the way our brains actually work in a group setting.

As a result, companies don’t get the right data, resulting in:

This oversight in our collaboration tools and processes hits every company’s bottom line in almost every part of the organization.

Balloon Unreachable Knowledge

Balloonr is a platform to address how humans actually share information and make decisions. We built Balloonr from the ground-up – based on hundreds of studies across the areas of cognitive science, neuroscience, social science, public health, and psychology. By removing the most costly cognitive biases (groupthink, anchoring, pattern recognition, gender bias, etc.) from collaboration, Balloonr is able to surface previously unreachable knowledge.

How It Works

Balloonr uses a staged workflow. To provide psychological safety, Balloonr is anonymous from start to finish. Users are able to remove anonymity at the end of the process and receive credit for their contributions.

Launch - Removes anchoring bias and ensure that everyone has an opportunity to contribute their ideas and feedback without interruptions.

Evolve - Allows collaboration without titles, identities, pleasantries, and courtesies getting in the way.

Pump - Merit-based voting without groupthink.

The Big Opportunity: We Are Creating The True Dataset

By leveraging our unique and less-biased dataset, Balloonr will serve as a platform for software applications to deliver high-value customer insights.

Balloonr Touches All Parts Of An Organization

People Are Talking About Us

Our Customers Are Industry Leaders

Our customers include teams, companies, and organizations from a wide range of functional areas and industries, including Fortune 50 companies, tech startups, mid-market technology companies, universities, pro sport teams, and hospitals.

Companies Are Seeing The Power

We Are Landing And Expanding Across The Enterprise

We have annual SaaS subscriptions with 15 initial customers. On top of the subscription fees, our service agreements typically include a small fee for customer success and optional services like single-sign-on integration. Subscription fees usually account for 70-80% of our deals.

We use a “land-and-expand” strategy, closing pilots or first subscriptions with one team or division, then leveraging customer success and inside sales to expand the account.

We Are Experiencing Huge Market Demand

Every group and company has this problem. Balloonr touches all parts of an organization and is industry-agnostic, so there is endless opportunity. Balloonr is currently used across diverse teams and functional areas, including:

• Agile
• Project management
• Product and user experience
• Process improvement
• People operations, HR, and talent
• Operations
• Marketing and communications
• Learning and development
• Innovation
• Executive and leadership
• Educators
• Diversity, inclusion, and belonging
• Cross-functional

Our customer base touches across many different industries, and to date, the majority of our customers have been inbound through earned media, customer referrals, and partnerships. We are first focused on priming the market and gaining early adopters.

We’re bringing something new to the workplace

We’re creating a new category – our biggest competition is the status quo. We’re replacing meetings, focus groups, green dot exercises, surveys, and antiquated idea/innovation platforms, and several collaboration platforms.

Our customers and the companies in our pipeline often say that they’ve always needed a product like this or the information and ideas that are surfaced.

Key Differentiators

• Eliminates cognitive biases (groupthink, anchoring, gender bias, etc.) and provides psychological safety
• Follows well-studied, research-supported best practices for how to get the best, most, and most diverse ideas and information from any group
• Prevents employee feelings of futility - all responses are visible, and top responses will be “ballooned” to top based solely on merit
• Is industry-agnostic and designed for Line of Business
• Uses a specialized staged flow with silos, anonymity, and real-time group collaboration to optimize for bias mitigation, productivity, and inclusive innovation

Our Investors

We are backed by incredible individuals and firms that have experience as both investors and as entrepreneurs themselves. They bring decades of experience both growing and investing in unicorns.

We Know What Companies Want And Need In This Space

Our v1 was a huge success. We have developed our product roadmap with significant customer input over the 1.5 years our application has been in-market. The 2nd version of the product is on track to launch in September 2018.

Crowdfunding is a key part of our current round of fundraising, which Wavemaker Partners is leading with a $250k investment. We are targeting $1M for total round (including crowdfunding), and we will use the investment to grow our team, bringing on a customer success team member to drive land and expand within companies, two to three engineers, and a second business development team member. This will accelerate our growth with v2 launch.

Key feature updates for v2 include:

• Significant user experience updates, including improved product flow

• Ready-to-use templates (which we call “flight plans”) organized by functional business areas and use cases

• Advanced analytics and reporting

• Advanced user segmentation, making it easier to engage the right audience for your use case

• Robust search, so all data and information is quickly accessible

• Integrations with collaboration tools, notification systems, enterprise identity management systems, and human resource information systems

• Image and file attachments

• External API

• Mobile applications for iOS and Android

Upcoming Milestones:

• 2018 September: Launch v2

• 2018 Q3: Reach $500k ARR

• 2019 Q1: Reach $1M in expansions from current customers

We are using AI to look across our unique, critical dataset.

We're a Mission Driven Team. And We Don't Stop Until We Win.

Our Advisors

A Note From Our Founders

First, hello and thank you for taking the time to learn more about Balloonr! We want to share more about our team, our story, and why we’re unstoppable in creating this new category. We also look forward to getting to know you.

From Amanda (CEO & Co-Founder)

Before founding Balloonr, I was a public health researcher in DC who developed national behavior change campaigns for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Energy. My work was focused on translating science and research into national behavior change campaigns.

It was in that role, I noticed a huge problem with the way that we work. I needed to get critical ideas and feedback from my team. I tried all of the tools available to me - surveys, in-person meetings, various collaboration tools. I was met with low response rate, discussions dominated by louder, senior voices, and off-topic conversations. At the same time, something really surprising started happening. I started receiving one-off phone calls and from more junior team members. The ideas and feedback that they shared were game changing for our firm, so I started asking – why did you come directly to me versus all of these tools available to you? Their answers again shocked me: “I didn’t know if my ideas were good enough or the right ones.” “I was intimidated by other people.” “I didn’t see a good time to share them.”

I dug into the research, and the findings shocked me. There is a system-wide, huge breakdown in the way that we work. All of our business tools and processes don’t account for the way humans actually share information or make decisions – they don’t account for what our brains do in a group setting. I became obsessed with solving this problem and left that position to found Balloonr.

From Noah (CTO & Co-Founder)

Before founding Balloonr, I developed and designed apps for IBM, Bloomberg, national political campaigns, and the Dalai Lama. My work has focused on designing and building products that result in organizational change and drive impact, and I love both delighting and surprising the user. I was experiencing and witnessing many of the same issues Amanda outlined above, so we both left our previous positions to join forces to found Balloonr.

We’ve seen the power of Balloonr. We’ve seen the way that it changes teams, companies, and organizations. The new ideas and innovation, amplified voices, streamlined processes, and increased productivity – it is incredible and drives us every day.

We are obsessed with solving this problem and growing the Balloonr behemoth. We decided to launch this Republic campaign because our vision and mission aligns with Republic’s – the best ideas (and companies) can come from anywhere. We hope that you invest today and take-off with us!

Amanda & Noah