Top business leaders continue to express their concerns that the U.S. will likely have a recession in 2023. Companies across industries are deciding whether or not to accept such predictions, while others already have taken steps to navigate it and mitigate its impact—particularly those using PINATA’s workforce-optimization platform.
The SaaS startup’s innovative technology enables companies to “manage, measure, and maximize front-line workforces” for restaurants, construction companies and others. Company management now has the with data to make informed decisions, using collaborative tools for goal setting, event planning, staffing, reporting, financial tracking, and data analysis.
“Front-line work is everywhere, and its mission critical,” says PINATA CEO Ian Ferguson. “But it’s also costly, logistically burdensome, and often entirely un-trackable. The farther we get from HQ, the greater the risk of wasted time, energy, and resources for management and workers alike.”
PINATA serves both large companies and startups. The platform provides efficiency for everyday operations via a centralized command center. Companies are able to keep up with the benefits evolving from the digital economy. They are able to gather and evaluate data to be more responsive to their frontline employees.
PINATA touts their customers’ satisfaction who say its impact is “immediate” and “dramatic,” and gives “newfound insight” into their operations. Its ease of coordination and effective resource deployment give their customers’ much improved outcomes, including “accountability, process automation and above all ROI measurability”.
“The power of PINATA is that it makes what can be very complicated into something very simplistic,” said Fairrah Jackson of Pernod Ricard, whose company uses the platform to oversee point-of-sale marketing initiatives. “At any time, anyone can go in and pull a number of really powerful reports to help us understand if we want to expand, modify, or discontinue a program.”
Those reports come from PINATA targeting specific front-line activities with smart, scalable, pre-configured solutions. They call them “Playbooks” — such as Retail Compliance, Consumer Sampling, Merchandising and more— that have distinct, field-tested reporting protocols, KPI dashboards, and contextual functionality. All rely on shared modular technology and PINATA’s meticulously-structured underlying software architecture.
Co-founded in 2015 by Josh Wand and Fred Kunda, PINATA has grown more than 400% year-over-year. Their enterprise SaaS platform has the unique advantage of focusing singularly on the performance of teams in location-based operations.
While a recession is looming, it uniquely serves to highlight PINATA’s value, according to Ann Lai of Bullpen Capital.
“Especially as we look towards a potential recession, the front line will be under pressure from the bottom line,” says Lai. “For operational teams being asked to do more with less, PINATA delivers need-to-have answers to a simple question: How do we best spend our next execution dollar?”
With its recently closed $10 million Series A funding co-led by M13 and Bullpen Capital, PINATA will use the funds to further develop its platform and bring on important resources to support its accelerating growth.
The company is expanding its Board of Directors with Lai and M13’s Rob Olson joining: Marc Ferrentino, COO of Yext; Mike Morini, CEO of WorkForce Software; Aaron Rudenstine, CEO of ButterflyMX; and PINATA’s co-founder Josh Wand, CEO of ForceBrands.
