David Cohen

HiveLive (covered previously, but significantly evolved since then) announced 5.6M in new funding from GroTech Capital and existing investors today. It was fun to watch John Kembel start off his pitch today with “Well, some stuff has changed since two months ago when we started preparing for VCIR, and now we’re done (fund raising)!” Previously, the company had raised 2.2M from angel investors.

HiveLive has evolved significantly into an enterprise social networking platform. Using HiveLive, enterprise customers can engage their customers using social tools more directly than with traditional point solutions such as Wikis, blogs, or forums. Hivelive says that the key differentiator in this emerging but already crowded market is their flexibility. John eloquently explained that bolting a wiki onto a social network and then onto a forum is not a scalable solution that larger brands will find success using. With HiveLive, customers can build highly customized systems with configurability, not code. I think it’s neat that end users can even add their own components (given appropriate permissions), thereby literally allowing the customers to build the community components themselves. That’s ultimate power to your natural community.

Hivelive has gotten into some interesting distribution opportunities. For example, Rally Software has implemented HiveLive in their new Rally Community Manager, which the company distributes through a SalesForce integration with its products.

Congrats to HiveLive for all the great progress and the funding.