It’s a big month for Collabor, a Maynard, MA-based maker of software that powers online communities—for banks, nonprofits, manufacturers and a slew of industries in between. The company is working on closing its first ever outside funding round and has just cross the 1-million-user mark across the sites its technology powers.
The five-year-old startup is working on collaboration software—a space that’s occupied by players large (Microsoft) and small (startups like Wiggio). Its big target, unlike many others, says CEO and founder Sandeep Kaujalgi, is organizations that are looking to collaborate with players beyond the company walls, rather than internal organizational collaboration.
“Our focus is almost solely on a business reaching out to other businesses, customers, stakeholders, membership organizations,” Kaujalgi says.
Collabor’s software, called Work 2.0, plugs into an organization’s existing databases. But Collabor prides itself in creating completely customized designs and interfaces for each client, depending on their business needs and audience. Within an organization, different types of users will have completely different functions available to them, based on the user profiles set up in the system.
“All collaboration is built on who the user is,” Kaujalgi says. “Our product looks completely different from company to company.” Work 2.0 offers functions such as sharing reports, polls and quizzes, photos, calendars, and user forums, and automatically translates content written in one language into the language of the user who will be reading it.
One of Collabor’s clients is Connected Living, a provider of online sites for helping seniors in residential communities keep in touch with their families from afar. The Work 2.0 software powers an interface for seniors that involves large buttons and colorful graphics, for an audience not used to Web browsing.
Another customer of Collabor’s is
