07 February 2019
Investing in Rever
Our team at Zetta was so excited when we met Rever — a continuous improvement software company led by a charismatic founder, Errette Dunn, that is transforming industrial businesses by digitally collecting the suggestions and feedback of their frontline employees, implementing those suggestions quickly, and creating an immediate and measurable return on investment.
Rever is a platform that enables employees of its customers to identify, test, and implement opportunities for incremental process improvements, and cultivate a continuous improvement culture (also known as “Kaizen” principles) in all teams. For example, a worker at Grupo Bimbo, one of Rever’s customers, might hypothesize that switching from a 1 centimeter pipe to a 5 centimeter pipe would speed up a tank refilling process. She could log the idea on Rever, test the change in a small-scale experiment, and use Rever to estimate the impact of making that change to her workflow. The ROI for any idea tested on Rever is clear, making it easy to decide which ones to implement.
More importantly, Rever helps its customers engage and recognize all employees for implementing improvement ideas, and share and reuse best practices at other sites operated by the customer. The Rever app is more than a suggestion box — it serves as line of communication to engage with line workers, who have the greatest visibility into the front line of operations but are difficult for executives to engage in organization-wide strategic objectives. With over 3 billion line workers worldwide, this is an immense opportunity to engage the global workforce.
The strength of Rever’s product lies in its democratization of the process of objectively evaluating an idea for improvement, then finding the most effective distribution channels to implement the improvement at all the affected places in customer’s organization, magnifying the impact of a seemingly minor improvement. The company has been able to quickly demonstrate its value to customers and has landed and expanded contracts with several of the largest manufacturers in the world, including Philip Morris, Grupo Bimbo, and Audi.
AI and automation continues to change the way we work, and Rever is enabling companies to empower all workers in the intelligence era, especially the communities who have seen the least of the benefits technology promised the 21st century workforce. We’re so excited to join them and our co-lead investor at Sequoia Capital on this mission.
