Bunchball – A leading gamification company

Rajat Paharia is the founder and Chief Product Officer of Bunchball, a market leader and visionary gamification company.  Founded in 2005, Bunchball provides cloud-based SaaS gamification platform to help companies improve customer loyalty and online engagement using game mechanics. Bunchball enables organizations to improve business performance by creating highly active and loyal customers, employees, and partners. Bunchball’s customers include Adobe, HP, Cisco, Warner Bros., Comcast, LiveOps, VMware and Hasbro. Based in Silicon Valley, Bunchball’s investors include Granite Ventures, Triangle Peak Partners, Northport Investments, and Correlation Ventures. Bunchball has a strong and experienced board of directors comprising of seasoned industry leaders and experts.

Bunchball’s gamification engine Nitro uses following game mechanics to help drive increase customer motivation, engagement and loyalty:

  • PBLs – Points, badges and Leader boards
  • Tracking and rewarding online activity
  • Creating virtual identities such as Avtars for self-expression
  • Collaborating as part of a team
  • Sharing with friends using social media (Facebook and Twitter)

Rajat’s skill set integrates a deep understanding of systems design and technology that stems from a four year career at design firm IDEO where he was co-director of the Software Experiences Practice. At IDEO, he worked with clients including AT&T Wireless, Avaya, Microsoft, McDonald’s, HP and Philips. Prior to IDEO, Rajat worked at Philips Consumer Electronics, IBM Research and ViewStar. He holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science from Stanford University, with a focus on Human Computer Interaction, and an undergraduate degree from the University of California Berkeley.

I admire Rajat’s success and see him as a role model for my business venture. His passion for games coupled with academic knowledge and industry experience in UX design helped to sense early on that integration of work and games can be powerful proposition for achieving desired business results. Viola! We now know that gamification ‘works’ and his intuition finally came true.

Reference:

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/426127/startups-like-bunchball-turn-brands-into-games/

 

Posted in: Week 04: Entrepreneur Bootcamp