Raydiant Acquires Staff Motivation Firm, Broadening Workplace Communications Offer

April 5, 2021 by Dave Haynes

Silicon Valley-area digital signage CMS startup Raydiant has announced its acquisition of Hoopla, a content and tech partner that does what it calls a performance management and motivation platform for workplaces.

The company, founded in 2017, was already using Hoopla’s data-driven, gamified, motivation solutions as part of its signage offer, and this certainly broadens Raydiant’s offer for workplace communications.

Says the PR:

Hoopla combines data intelligence, motivational psychology and modern game mechanics in a powerfully simple application that makes it easy for managers to motivate team performance from anywhere.

Engaged and motivated teams grow profits three times faster than competitors, have double the sales, are 38 percent more productive, and report 46 percent less turnover. Hoopla has hundreds of customers around the world and many report impressive performance gains of 35 percent and more.

Raydiant’s elegant digital experience platform, combined with Hoopla’s data driven motivation, engagement, and gamification solutions will power the future work with solutions available for in-office, remote, and hybrid workplaces.

“This acquisition marks the first major milestone in Raydiant’s 2021 growth strategy. We initially partnered with Hoopla because a big need from our customers was to display performance metrics, to engage employees and establish a winning culture. As we worked together, we realized there is a much bigger opportunity to enable the future of work,” says Bobby Marhamat, Raydiant’s CEO. “The addition of Hoopla enhances our ability to better serve the growing needs of all of our customers — in the office, working remotely, and for our brick-and-mortar customers that have asked for back-office solutions.”

As a result of this combination, Raydiant will deliver new solutions for remote and in-office employees alike, with a focus on keeping workers safe, informed, connected and engaged. A new, fully integrated version of its SecondScreen application for remote workers, dozens of data integrations, and better ways to collaborate and communicate are just some of the new planned capabilities.

“We are thrilled to be joining the Raydiant family,” says Mike Smalls, CEO of Hoopla. “After listening to our customers and hearing about their challenges as they plan to reopen offices, we came to the conclusion that joining forces with Raydiant was the best way for us to deliver the best solutions to address those challenges and achieve our aggressive growth objectives.”

The acquisition comes a few weeks after Raydiant closed a $13M series A funding round with VCs.

Interesting. This is like a smaller-scale version of the recent deal between Four Winds Interactive and the Irish firm Poppulo. In both cases, you have a digital signage software company marrying a company that does complementary work in the same vertical.