Nearly a year to the day, RallyPoint celebrated Veterans Day by launching out of private beta. This year, however, the team will be honoring the holiday a bit differently: by springing out of public beta with a $5 million Series A.
"A lot has evolved since then," said CEO and co-founder Yinon Weiss, referring to the earliest days of RallyPoint.
And he's not exaggerating. The social networking platform, pegged the "Linkedin for the military," won a $100,000 grand prize award at the 2012 MassChallenge Awards Ceremony. Two months later, the team announced they raised a $1 million seed round, and they have since created "a very strong powerhouse engineering team," according to Weiss.
This latest round of financing, led by San Francisco-based DBL Investors, brings the company's total funding to $6.6 million — all within one year of launching. The platform now boasts 125,000 members, with up to 1,000 new active military members and veterans joining daily.
The initial idea for RallyPoint sprung out of Harvard Business School, where Weiss and fellow co-founder Aaron Kletzing reunited after being stationed in Iraq in 2008. The duo started RallyPoint because they understood the struggles veterans face when transitioning to civilian life.
In 2012, the unemployment rate for new veterans aged 18-24 averaged 20.4 percent. "[This problem] is incredibly real," said Kletzing in a prior interview. "The technology we built can completely transform the pain points in the military."
Nearly one in 10 members of the U.S. Army are using RallyPoint from bases around the world, and all utilizing the platform takes is a .mil email address. Once on board, members can use the platform to discover career opportunities while still within the military and secure a civilian job before having to make any transitions.
To make the process even easier, RallyPoint has started partnering with several companies focused on hiring military talent, including Honeywell, DuPont, AT&T and Bloomberg LP. Each company approached RallyPoint, according to Weiss, because they wanted to reach the gated military community.
Over the last year, Weiss said the focus has been on building out RallyPoint's core team and product, as well as creating this sense of community. "Now that we have that community, we are going to focus more on growing those corporate services that benefit our members," he added.
The team will also focus on creating a mobile presence. Later this week, they will be rolling out a "mobile-friendly version of the site 1.0," and have plans to launch a mobile app early next year.
With an estimated one-million military members leaving the service in the next three years, according to RallyPoint, the team wants to ensure those veterans will be entering into the workforce with the relationships and knowledge necessary to jump start a private-sector career.
