Calinda Software

Calinda Software provides social collaboration solutions for SharePoint, to make SharePoint simple as social and efficient as collaboration.

Calinda Software’s solutions enable customers to create and customize Social Intranets, Enterprise Social Networks and E-mail Enabled Collaboration sites with Microsoft SharePoint easily and cost-effectively. All conversations are consolidated in a consistent, efficient and flexible collaboration stream. It includes patent-pending e-mail gateway technologies to collaborate with external guests without opening the firewall and giving direct access to the SharePoint sites.

Alex Mermod, 33, Co-founder & CEO: Alex previously was the CTO of Bee Ware ($9m raised with Sofinnova Partners, acquisition and integration of a 20 people competitor), a manager at BMC Software and an Engineer at Sun Microsystems in Palo Alto. He holds a diploma from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.

Seb Bassompierre, 33, Co-founder & CTO: Seb has many years of experience with the most advanced technologies (Java/J2EE, XML, etc.). He was one of the authors of the industry leading PATROL Visualis and BSM Discovery software products at BMC Software. Seb also taught Java development at the University of Avignon.

Ray Bouchet, 40, Sales Manager: Ray joined Calinda in March 09 after a successful career in selling major software from Computer Associates, Software AG, Microfocus in France. Ray brings his experience in selling to large corporations, his relentless positive energy and his business development skills. 

Chris Guyard, 45, Co-founder & Business Angel: Chris brings his experience of business, management and entrepreurship, as well as his business contacts. He is currently the CEO of Bee Ware, which he co-founded and for which he secured more than $9m of VC funding from Sofinnova Partners. As a true Serial Entrepreneur, he previously founded Axians and headed several companies inside the Vinci Group.

Board of advisors: 9 major business figures took a stake in Dec 08 and help the company in its development.

Today, corporations are organized in projects with distributed teams, customers and partners. The dominant communication tools remain the e-mail and the telephone. The e-mail allows communicating more and faster, but it creates a significant information overload.
At Calinda Software, we created a technology that dynamically builds maps from e-mails exchanged within a workgroup, regardless of type of e-mail people use, and without installing anything on their computers.
The resulting visual representation simplifies the identification of key information, decision making and capitalization of knowledge.
This solves the main productivity challenge in the knowledge economy, with a 10 to 20% gain.

Although the $4.4bn Team Collaboration Software market is growing 10-20% per year [Gartner] and about 100% of large and medium corporations purchased a platform, studies show a poor adoption rate by users of only 20%, while e-mail is used by 99%. Customers see this as a failure of their team collaboration software projects are looking for a better return on investment through an improved adoption rate.

MindUp Enterprise: Sell Software Licences, integration services and yearly maintenance to large companies. THe solution is integrated with the Enterprise collaboration platforms in place (such as Microsoft SharePoint) through connectors. Pricing: $30k-$500k, depending on number of users (50 to several ‘000s)

Distribution :
MindUp Enterprise: distribute through software integrators.
Sell a bundle with other software as complete solutions (collaboration platform+MindUp), along with integration services provided by resellers and partners (CAP GEMINI, ATOS ORIGIN, etc.). 

MindUp Live: Sell monthly online Software service subscriptions to project teams, small companies and consultancies. Pricing €20 per user per month (max 100).

Calinda Software developed the patent-pending and award-winning C2IM technology, to capture, model and visualize collective knowledge on the fly. Using this technology allows to leverage and capitalize the vast amount of knowledge exchanged by e-mail within projects, in an non-intrusive way, regardless of the messaging applications the participants use. Its basic principle is to structure the messages people send to the project team, allow recipients to reply specifically on a given item or paragraph, and insert traceability codes to allow MindUp to retrieve the context and thread structured discussions.

The resulting model of e-mail discussions can be used to improve the performance and reliability of non-deterministic analysis techniques (semantic, syntaxic, statistic, etc.) by using the structure of the analyzed knowledge as a heuristic.