A startup technology company with a presence in Wichita has decided to make the city home to all its operations.
Knowledge As A Service Inc., which has developed an employee training app called Ringorang, is moving its leadership and development team to Wichita and expects to hire 40 people over the next 12 months and invest $4 million in its operations here.
“We’re doing what Wichita has asked people to do,” says BW Barkley, the company’s COO. “We’re all-in on Wichita, 100%.”
Barkley says around 95% of its development team is overseas now, but that will become 85% in Wichita by the end of the year and will be fully relocated in about eight months.
More immediately, as KAAS also looks for office space in Wichita, the company’s president and chief vision officer, Robert Feeney, who co-founded the business with Barkley, is relocating here from San Diego.
Barkley is a Wichita native who returned last year after two decades on the West Coast.
It was during that time that Barkley and Feeney met through the entertainment industry and the foundation for an idea they believe has global implications was laid.
The Ringorang app provides continual training in an easy and interactive format. What differentiates the platform, Barkley and Feeney previously told the WBJ, is that it is actually changing behavior, not just teaching answers to be marked on a test and forgotten soon after.
Barkley says what he found working in Wichita was a city that would be the perfect accelerator for the company, from a supportive tech and business community, to the opportunities to apply the app to manufacturers.
“We have never seen a city that is so aggressive with its entrepreneurial support,” Barkley says. “We’re more embraced here and we’re going to move things faster because of that.”
Other business functions like human resources and marketing are also moving, with the transition already under way.
KAAS, which has more information on the app available on its website, is also preparing a crowd-funding round next month that Barkley says has sizable pre-commitments.
The company is looking to raise $1 million — the initial cap of the platform it's using — then $5 million in a following round.
“We’ll use those resources to begin hiring,” Barkley says.
The Ringorang app already has a growing list of customers, including Verizon and a Fortune 50 technology company that they contractually cannot identify.
In a letter from its leadership being sent to local business leaders that Barkley provided to the WBJ, the company says the local entrepreneurial ecosystem, including entities like NXTUS, and growing collaboration with institutions like Wichita State University and other local companies are setting the stage for something big for KAAS.
“We bring to Wichita capital, talent, existing Fortune 500 customers, recurring revenue, scale-ready business, and endless plains of passion,” the letter reads. “We invite you to be part of our exciting growth as world-leading companies adopt our innovative product. We have an opportunity to go big with this which is exactly what Wichita wants: a big success story. We intend to share some of that limelight with this great city we love.”
