The Early Years

Carlos Diaz (CEO) and Christophe Routhieau (CTO) have been at the cutting edge of web 2.0 concepts since 2003 during their time at Group Reflect, a leading french web design agency, and were one of the first implementers of multi-author blogs for their customers.

This specialist experience had enabled them to adapt these concepts for use within their own organisation, and within a few months they had built up a very rich and valuable knowledge base of content. Based on these rapid results, they decided to build a software suite that would adapt these beneficial technologies to use within a business environment.

Prototype and Success

In 2006 they showcased their solution in the public domain and promoted it in the blogosphere, where it was discovered by Dassault Systemes. One meeting later, Dassault became blueKiwi's first customer, implementing a solution that allowed their distributed workforce to work together more effectively.

A few months later, La Poste and Ortronics followed suit.

Going Mainstream

Realising the customer demand for this type of offering, Carlos and Christophe decided to focus all of their energy on becoming a major player in the Enterprise Social Software market. Jean-Michel Vergne (ex PeopleSoft) was hired to lead the blueKiwi professional services team, and strong sales in France led the way for the international expansion plans.

In May 2007, Sofinnova Partners announced an investment of $5.3million which will be used to fund international expansion and rapid innovation. A few months later, Microsoft invested further resources and expertise into the development of blueKiwi, greatly enhancing the opportunities for large enterprises to integrate highly innovative social software with their existing platforms.

Recognition by industry analysts

In October 2007, blueKiwi entered the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Collaboration and Social Software, the only European vendor in a group of more than 20 players, further validating blueKiwi's rapid success in a very short space of time.

Going International

In early 2008, Rob Gray (ex Microsoft) was hired to lead the UK subsidiary, and Leandra Choay (ex Criteo) was hired as VP Sales for France. Today, blueKiwi Software has offices in France and the UK, many large blue-chip customers, with thousands of people using blueKiwi on a daily basis to improve the performance of their organisations by creating internal and external communities, stimulating innovation and improving knowledge sharing.