After scrolling through multiple collaborative channels and reading through hundreds of emails, the endless time suck leaves little room for actual work.
Ryver, a new cloud-based, team collaboration, communication platform launched its public beta to compete in the enterprise tech market and bring some sense of sanity to our overloaded inboxes.
The company formerly known as Contatta, took the most powerful and popular tools from their CRM and collaboration platform, weaved in features from enterprise communication products on the market, added some new tools, put it all on steroids and re-emerged as Ryver (pronounced: river).
[youtube]https://youtu.be/amcdCfiWwk8[/youtube]
Interview with CEO Ryver Pat Sullivan
“Originally [Contatta] set out to solve communications for sales teams and we put out a product last year in beta. During that time [testers] gravitated to the team communication features; we ripped it out, all the features that weren’t related to team communication, and added a few features that were even richer,” CEO Ryver, Pat Sullivan said.
Ryver is all about getting people out of their inbox, helping teams improve the speed and effectiveness of their daily conversations and simplifying the flow of communication, Sullivan explained.
“In email, it’s a mixture of things that are important and non-important. Ryver pulls out the most important communications from your email that are occurring instantaneously…instead of getting buried with things that have nothing to do with team communication,” Sullivan said.
Ryver’s platform uses the concept of Teams to build out conversation threads. Users invite Team Members-inside or outside of a company-to a private or company discussion and can organize their conversations by topic.
Within a thread, file sharing and formatted posts can be done from one single location instead of toggling around from team to team.
A unique feature to Ryver is the ability to copy or “Promote” pieces of a thread to a new or active post and stitch together topics and thoughts with other Team Members.
Forget the endless scroll of team communication, Ryver’s Post Stream and notification system will summarize a user’s Team updates in one organized thread.
For those on-the-go, users have the ability to respond and insert comments from their notifications and Streams directly back into their thread via mobile device.
“It’s like reading a newspaper, “Sullivan said, “I will see everything new from every team I’m a member of, in one view. It’s like reading 30 emails in 30 seconds.”
As for their API, Ryver is designed to integrate with Zapier and over 400 different web applications.
“We built Ryver to be totally open so you can integrate with virtually anything. [We want Ryver] to be the hub of a team’s communication, and send information to as many applications,” Sullivan said.
Ryver does offer a free or paid version-the Full Ride costs $5.55/month/user with unlimited search, storage and API integration.
Sullivan said private beta testers who loved Ryver the most “were the ones who have to move the fastest and compete in an arena where things are moving really fast. Speed is so important, email can’t keep up with the environment.”
Ryver is available across all mobile platforms and on iOS; Android is coming soon.
To date, Ryver has raised $9.2 million in capital. Here’s the breakdown from Ryver: $3.5MM Convertible Round (June 2012), $3.2MM Series A Round (June 2013), $1.5MM Convertible Round (April 2014) and $1.0MM Convertible Round (February 2015).
The company was also one of the winners of the Fall 2013 Arizona Commerce Authority Arizona Innovation Challenge.
This is Sullivan’s 5th venture-backed company and he intends to build Ryver in Arizona.
“In conversations with Silicon Valley VCs, the question was ‘would you move to Silicon Valley?’ I always said, absolutely not. I love Arizona. I’ve built two successful companies here. I wouldn’t want to do this any other place.”
Read more about startups in Arizona here.
Watch Pat Sullivan’s talk on our Lunch and Learn series here.
Graphics provided by Ryver