ProoV is the world’s first Pilot-as-a-Service platform that seamlessly connects enterprises to independent software vendors. An Israeli startup called prooV is building what it calls the first “proof of concept” platform which lets an enterprise test-drive a startup’s technology before they sign a purchase order for it.It has announced its global launch along with a $7 million USDSeries A funding round from Mangrove Capital Partners and OurCrowd.
prooV consolidates and optimizes the Proof of Concept (PoC) ecosystem enabling global enterprises to discover, connect, and engage with independent software vendors (ISVs). And help them to easily run and evaluate multiple PoCs through remote and secure testing environments.
The prooV platform allows organizations to discover, connect, and complete PoCs within days, not months. With prooV’s Pilot-as-a-Service platform you can discover solutions and easily run multiple PoCs at once on secure cloud-based testing environments.
prooV’s co-founders, Toby Olshanetsky (CEO) and Alexey Sapozhnikov (CTO) have spent their 20-year career building enterprise software, mostly for startups. It was founded in 2015 and headquartered in Tel Aviv. It is a privately held company backed by Mangrove Capital Partners and OurCrowd. Both co-founders have over 20 years of experience running PoCs from the enterprise as well as the vendor side.
The process for an enterprise to buy a startup’s technology pretty much goes like this: Startup pitch the tech. If the IT folks like it, they install it on their test computers and play with it. If they think it will work for their company, they install it in a limited fashion in a more realistic way and make it work with other their apps and devices. This is called a “proof of concept” (POC). They might even roll out a POC on their real network to limited employees to give it a bigger test drive before spending big bucks to buy the app and set up for all employees for real.
It is this POC stage that prooV is trying to simplify. Toby Olshanetsky told that a startup signing to prooV has to go through a validation process. They want to make sure it can actually do PoC. The enterprise can then use the prooV service to securely trial the startup’s software on their actual network. And it can be used like a dating service for startups and validated enterprises to find each other. He also told that the company has signed up 300 startups and 44 enterprises that are beta testing its platform and running 91 pilot tests.
ProoV’s CEO and co-founder Toby Olshanetsky said, “The PoC process has been complex, tedious, and highly inefficient for both enterprises and vendors until now. prooV offers a radical new approach to testing, tracking, and analyzing vendor solutions, accelerating the journey from Request for proposals (RFP) to PoC. Our goal is to level the playing field for Independent Software Vendors regardless of size, resources, or geography while also giving enterprises around the world greater insight into the best and most innovative technology solutions to suit their needs. prooV’s unique testing environments and sophisticated predictive analytics allow the company to simulate real-time production environments for customers”.
It provides a marketplace for emerging software businesses and enterprise customers to discover each other. And also provides a proprietary one-time data integration through which enterprises can securely connect with an infinite number of pilot partners. This solves the problem of costly and time- consuming pilots that are currently used gain access to new technology without the overhead or risk of a full-scale deployment.
Roy Saar, a partner at Mangrove Capital said, “prooV addresses and solves a huge pain point in the market today by helping enterprises and software vendors more easily connect and run complex, time-consuming, and resource-draining PoCs”.
Whereas David Stark, a partner at OurCrowd said, “The prooV Pilot-as-a-Service approach reimagines the PoC process from beginning to end, making it easier for enterprises and vendors alike to share new solutions, test, track, analyze, and report. There is nothing else like it on the market today”.
