Glisser, a London-based startup with a vision to put an end to the era of tedious presentations by letting presenters include real-time polls and Q&As, has closed a $1 million seed round. Investors included Downing Ventures, London Co-Investment Fund, as well as some unnamed business angels. The funds will be utilized to expand into US market, with a plan to open an office in New York.

Glisser was founded in 2014 and launched in Beta at Event Tech Live later that year. It was created to offer a simple way of collecting more data at business events and meetings. It began when Glisser CEO Mike repeatedly saw live events and meetings taking a huge chunk out of his budget but not delivering the data needed to prove their ROI. He also attended a vast number of presentations that were not only poorly delivered, but also quite boring. With his 10+ years of marketing experience, he decided to put his mind to the matter, and a way to disrupt the space.

Since its inception, Glisser has roped in numerous giants like Amex, Visa, Bloomberg and UBS, as well as supporting five government departments and multiple universities, MBAs, schools and startup events. Now, Glisser is also backed by Downing Ventures and a number of angel investors, including Leonora Valvo, founder of eTouches and InsightXM. In 2015, Glisser graduated the MassChallengeUK accelerator, winning the gold award, and is currently part of the Microsoft Ventures Accelerator.

Mike Piddock, CEO, Glisser said in an official statement,

The news of $1m investment means we are well positioned for growth over the next 12 months to meet an increasingly global portfolio of clients. We’ve proven that Glisser has a direct impact on audience engagement in business presentations and that companies across the world want to use at their events. Now we’ve just made it ridiculously easy to try, learn and use.

Its vision has now been translated to an interesting reality – Glisser’s web-based platform is all about supporting other forms of audience engagement, such as enabling participants to save and share slides to social media. The response has been quite successful, with a total of around 10,000 presenters signed up and using its software at this point. It is also focusing on integrating its presentation platform with Microsoft’s PowerPoint behemoth, as an “add-in” extension which allows users of the latter software to tap directly into its interactive features. This is aimed to target the 20m business events held each year globally.

By using Glisser, users of PowerPoint can now tap into the integration, allowing access to features include polling, live audience Q&A, real-time slide sharing to audience devices, and audience analytics and feedback. Glisser’s own web product works in a simple manner- presenters upload their slides to its cloud and receive a unique event URL in return, which they can then use during presentations to gather responses and feedback from the audience.

With Glisser, sitting through mind-numbing presentations is now history!


 

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