On Thursday, Boston's Objective Logistics, a leading talent optimization tech startup, secured $5.3 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Atlas Ventures, with return investors Google Ventures and NextView Ventures also participating. To date, Objective Logistics has raised $7.6 million in total.
The funding will be used to scale the startup's operations to meet customer demand and to expand the Objective Logistics' MUSE platform within the restaurant industry and into other verticals. "[We're] consistently seeing a two to eight percent increase in top-line sales across our customer base," Objective Logistics chief executive Philip Beauregard told BostInno, which is "unprecedented for the restaurant and retail verticals." The company hopes to ink deals with major restaurant chains and retailers in various stages of deployment, Beauregard shared.
MUSE is the company's dynamic software platform and a "moneyball for high-turnover workforces," according to the Beauregard. Part game, MUSE creates a interactive and competitive environment that ranks waiters, waitstaff, and hourly workers on a leader board and rewards them with choice of shifts and other prices automatically, based on their performance. Part management tool, the software collects and analyzes all data produced in a given shift, day, or week to provide those in charge with insight into individual employee performance.
"I like to think of MUSE as ushering in a new era of Performance Management software," explained the CEO. "It involves taking in mass amounts of data on employee performance, automates rewards and provides optimization and insight on how to improve productivity and employee satisfaction."
The company will be releasing a mobile-based version of MUSE in July 2013 with a "beautiful" major upgrade.
Objective Logistics currently has nine brands, representing over 70 restaurants, using MUSE software. "We're really happy with the progress we've made to date and the response of the market. We really have built a kick-ass team that I think can form a large, masthead enterprise software company here in our beloved Boston," the chief executive said.
To ensure that the company continues to progress and keeps up with the high demand, Objective Logistics has enlisted a handful of new and talented of the city's best and brightest executives over the past year. Recent hires include Objective Logistics' VP of Sales Eric Poley, who hails from Salesforce, where he headed up the large enterprise sales team through the company's public offering. Masterful VP of Operations, Matthew Trail, worked at Bullhorn prior to joining the Objective Logistics, while VP of Engineering Melissa Leffler came to the team from eRoom and Awareness Networks.
Objective Logistics now employees 20 people and holds two offices in Cambridge and New Bedford, Mass. "I think our team is of which we are most proud. But the inbound demand and enthusiasm for MUSE doesn't suck either. All in all, a long way to go, but we won't stop until we reach the summit," shared Beauregard.
Started in 2009, Objective Logistics is a pioneer in the performance management field, with new entrants and competitors popping up daily. Past companies within the talent-tech space, such as SuccessFactors, Kenexa, and Taleo, have all been bought out for more than $1 billion from industry giants like Salesforce.com and Microsoft. If this round of funding is any hint of what is to come, Objective Logistics has a bright future ahead.
