Four-year-old Workboard Inc. is looking to streamline how companies execute their business strategies.

To do so, the startup announced on Wednesday that it has raised $9.3 million in funding from Microsoft Ventures, Floodgate Management Co. LLC and several existing investors. The capital will go toward widening the adoption of Workboard’s namesake cloud platform, which is already used by the likes of IBM Corp. to manage strategic planning activities.

The main highlight of the service is a dashboard that enables executives to keep track of how important business initiatives are coming along. Workboard displays items one atop another in neat columns, each of which includes a progress bar on the right side that makes it possible to quickly check how the company is doing.

Users can click on a goal to bring up a more detailed breakdown. A company looking to attract a certain number of early adopters to a new software product, for example, could pull installation data into Workboard to show executives how many customers have come aboard so far. The service visualizes records in the form of straightforward graphs to make them easily digestible. 

These business intelligence features are paired with collaboration tools that let executives act upon the data in the dashboard. Among other things, Workboard sports a digital whiteboard for organizing to-do items and a Slack chatbot that can be used to quickly access specific reports. An executive may also have the virtual assistant send kudos to team members when they complete a task.

Workboard said the ability to orchestrate the implementation of a new business plan in one place can help companies move faster. Plus, the fact that the platform organizes everything into neat reports theoretically makes it easier to share information across an organization, which speeds things up even further. 

Besides IBM, Workboard’s platform has also been adopted by Sony Corp., Slack Technologies Inc., Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and several others. 

Image: Workboard