Workboard today announced a Series A funding round of $9.3 million from new investors Floodgate and Microsoft Ventures and its existing investors. The funding enables the company to accelerate sales and marketing of Workboard’s Active Strategy Management SaaS offering, a breakthrough for enterprises that need to iterate, measure and achieve strategy at market speed. This round comes on top of a previous $2.75 million seed round, bringing the company’s total funding to $12.1 million.  

“Workboard recognized an entirely new problem and need as the traditional enterprise approach to strategy iteration, communication and execution alignment is outpaced by rapid market and technology change,” said Arjun Chopra, partner at Floodgate and Workboard board member. “Organizations must be able to operationalize bolder strategic priorities faster or they risk falling behind, yet few have an efficient, effective approach today. Workboard has impressive customer success and is seeing strong demand for its Active Strategy Management solution. We’re excited about the value this drives for customers.”

“Workboard optimizes strategy management for quicker decision-making and better implementation," said Nagraj Kashyap, corporate vice president, Microsoft Ventures. "It’s a promising solution at a time when enterprises are looking to transform all aspects of their businesses."

Markets Evolving Faster than Enterprise Strategy Cycles

Today, the rate of market and technology change far exceeds most enterprise’s ability to iterate and engage teams on new strategic priorities.  As the Amazon juggernaut and digital innovators disrupt markets faster every quarter, companies must rapidly and continuously adjust strategies and engage employees in new business directions. According to a recent survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit, nine out of ten corporate strategy plans fail to meet stated goals and more than half of companies say they struggle to fix the problem and lose business to competitors as a result.

“It’s a pivotal time for enterprises as market pace and their own business planning cadence diverge more every month. While strategy windows are getting shorter, the world is getting more complex,” said Deidre Paknad, CEO and co-founder of Workboard, Inc. “To gain and sustain advantage, companies must activate short-range strategic priorities, localize them to front line teams, and measure objectively to learn and iterate faster than ever before. Workboard enables organizations to activate smarter strategies faster and make strategic priorities remarkably transparent and interactive.”  

Aligning and Accelerating Business Results

The Workboard SaaS solution transforms an antiquated approach to strategy alignment and progression into a dynamic, data-driven practice augmented by analytics and intelligence. It helps organizations iterate, measure and achieve their strategy at market speed. The software enables organizations to quickly:

Iterate on strategic priorities quarterly with a more efficient, data driven and inclusive process

Activate strategies by mapping and tailoring them to teams that need to execute throughout the organization and tying in operational data

Measure progress on their strategic plans objectively, transparently and automatically

Augment strategy and execution with machine learning insights on risks and execution patterns for better results

Replace onerous reporting with continuous visibility and transparency to improve business outcomes

Deidre Paknad is CEO and co-founder of Workboard, Inc. She has decades of experience leading large enterprise and emerging startup teams on strategic pursuits and is passionate about helping other leaders engage their teams in great achievement. As a seasoned entrepreneur, she has founded and led several companies, created new market categories and established industry reference models. Her last company, PSS Systems, was acquired by IBM where she went on to lead a high-growth global business working with CIOs on IT transformation initiatives. She writes regularly on leadership, goal alignment, execution excellence and mentoring. Deidre has twice been recognized by the Smithsonian Institution for innovation and has 16 patents.