Wazoku is a London-based innovation scale-up that helps the world’s largest and most complex businesses to innovate at scale and manages a product suite for enterprise innovation. Led by CEO Simon Hill, the company works with global enterprises including NASA, Enel, HSBC and Shell. Wazoku’s offerings include collective intelligence tools that capture employee thoughts, predictions and provide actionable insights using quantitative and qualitative inputs. The company has announced the acquisition of Danish collective intelligence platform Mindpool to extend its collective intelligence offering and European presence. Wazoku will use the funding to drive R&D across its product suite, accelerate internationalization, pursue further acquisitions and manage hyperscale growth over the next two years. Wazoku provides an Innovation Operating System and enterprise innovation platform that structures how large, multi‑national organizations capture, evaluate, develop, and select ideas. Its platform includes idea management, open innovation tools, and consulting services powered by a proprietary challenge‑driven innovation methodology. The company serves global customers including AstraZeneca, HSBC, NASA, and Waitrose. Wazoku has expanded through acquisitions, acquiring InnoCentive in 2020 and Change in 2021. Leadership says the company plans to continue investing in product development and building its global team to drive scaled innovation outcomes. In March 2022 Wazoku secured a $2.0 million line of credit from SaaS Capital to support its growth initiatives. Wazoku provides an idea management software platform that enables organisations to gather, manage, develop, analyse and implement ideas to solve business problems and identify new opportunities. Led by CEO Simon Hill, the company offers software and services focused on innovation and strategic objectives. Wazoku announced a £1.25M funding round that brings total capital raised to £7.35M. The round was led by Calculus Capital, an Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS) and Venture Capital Trust (VCT) specialist, and supported by other shareholders and members of Wazoku’s management team. The company is continuing its expansion with the acquisition of U.S. open innovation firm InnoCentive’s assets, creating an innovation platform and community. InnoCentive operates a global network of almost 500,000 expert problem solvers including CEOs, PhD students, engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs, retired technologists and business leaders. Wazoku builds Idea Spotlight, an idea management SaaS platform that helps organisations capture, evaluate, improve and implement ideas from any audience. The platform is used by enterprise clients including the UK Ministry of Defence, John Lewis & Partners, HSBC and Aviva. CEO Simon Hill has emphasised engaging and crowdsourcing ideas from different groups to rethink collaboration and innovation. The company describes its product as supporting idea capture across employees, customers, partners, the general public and other stakeholder groups. Wazoku has raised outside capital, most recently securing additional funding to support its growth. Wazoku provides a cloud-based idea management software platform called Idea Spotlight that enables organisations to run internal and external crowdsourcing initiatives and draw ideas from employees, suppliers and partners. Led by founder and CEO Simon Hill, the company serves customers including Aviva, Waitrose, John Lewis Partnership, Virgin Trains East Coast and Avis Budget Group. Wazoku raised £2.3m in the reported financing, bringing total funds raised to £3.6m to date. The round included £680k in venture debt from Barclays alongside equity financing from existing investors Cambridge Angels and Fig. The company will use the proceeds for product development and corporate expansion.

Total raised

$20M

Funding rounds

7

Latest round

Series B

Latest activity

Sep 2022