Badgeville Announces Key Additions to Executive Team

MENLO PARK, CA--(Marketwire - Aug 29, 2011) - Badgeville, The Social Loyalty Platform, today announced that it has appointed Kevin Akeroyd as Senior Vice President of Field Operations, and Raymond Lim as Vice President of Finance, both from Salesforce.com and Jigsaw. The company is also announcing additional key hires to its team. Launched in September 2010 with three employees, Badgeville has grown a team of 35 experts in social gaming, gamification, SaaS, and analytics in under a year. The company plans to expand to 70 employees in 2012. Badgeville, which recently raised a $12M Series B round led by Norwest Venture Partners and El Dorado Ventures, is the leading social loyalty and smart gamification platform with more than 75 customers including NBC, TechCrunch, Kings Hawaiian, Deloitte Digital, Bluefly.com, and The Active Network.

Kevin Akeroyd is an experienced veteran of field operations and enterprise software, including leadership roles across sales, marketing and business development. He joins Badgeville directly from Salesforce.com, where he managed operations, revenue, marketing alliances, and all client and community facing services for Jigsaw. Prior to Jigsaw, he held general management positions at large public companies such as Acxiom Digital (previously Digital Impact) and RR Donnelley & Sons Company. He also held President and CEO positions at several start-ups, including Gallery Player, Inc. and The Loan Page, Inc. Kevin is an alumnus of the EPSO program at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and has a degree in Business Administration from the University of Washington.

Raymond Lim has more than 20 years of experience executing business and financial strategies that have successfully grown and scaled several technology startup companies. Raymond was recently the Vice President of Finance for CrowdFlower, which runs a crowdsourcing platform for Labor-on-Demand. He was responsible for the performance of CrowdFlower's finance, accounting, HR, and legal functions. Prior to that, he was the Vice President of Finance for Jigsaw, where he readied the company for its $175 million acquisition by Salesforce.com. Before Jigsaw, Lim led the G&A and Hosted Services functions at ECbridges, a software company specialized in e-commerce systems for enterprise clients. Earlier in his career, Lim held various management positions at Compuware where he ran several product engineering and integration teams.

Badgeville has expanded its product, services, and engineering teams, adding deep area expertise and honing Badgeville's competitive edge in social gaming, loyalty and analytics.

"Our Series B funding has enabled us to hire some of the industry's brightest business and technology leaders in strategic areas, securing our place not only as the leader in gamification, but as one of the most innovative software companies in Silicon Valley addressing today's challenges of big data, social analytics, and real-time engagement," said Kris Duggan, CEO of Badgeville. "Kevin and Raymond bring unmatched skill building revenues and visibility for gamified enterprise applications, and the rest of our new team members enhance Badgeville's leadership across analytics, psychology, loyalty and social gaming, putting us on the fast track in innovating the modern web experience."

Tim Piatenko joins Badgeville as Manager of Analytics. Piatenko, an expert in data mining, data visualization and analysis, was previously a Senior Analyst at Zynga, where he analyzed large data across Zynga's expansive portfolio of social games including Treasure Island, Café World, and CityVille, the most explosive launch in social gaming history. He previously worked as a lead analyst for eBay and Like.com. Piatenko earned his PhD in high energy Physics from the California Institute of Technology.

Tony Ventrice joins Badgeville as a Senior Game Designer. Ventrice comes to Badgeville from Zynga and Playdom, where he designed Zynga Poker, Playdom's Mobsters 2, and Deep Realms. Ventrice also led design on I Am T-Pain, one of the iPhone's top-selling games, at leading mobile game maker Smule. His work has earned many industry awards for game design including IGN Best of the Year and the Duke's Award.

Badgeville also recently hired four top-tier producers for its Client Services team including Oded Korcyzn (psychology producer), Havy Nguyen (social loyalty producer), Kevin Tucker (loyalty innovation producer), and Alex Kivelstadt (social game design producer.)

Korcyzn earned his PhD in anthropology from Stanford University and has extensive experience as a qualitative researcher and analyst. Previously, he founded Geotrio, which provided GPS-based auto tours via Mobile, web and Facebook. Nguyen comes to Badgeville from American Express, where she was a Senior Manager and managed travel and entertainment partners for Membership Rewards including Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, Marriott International, The Ritz-Carlton, Wynn Las Vegas, and Universal Studios. Prior to that she managed strategies for the exclusive Centurian Card. Also from American Express, Tucker previously managed innovation for loyalty programs for Membership Rewards. Kivelstadt joins Badgeville from Playdom, where he led game design for Mobsters 2. The producers work directly with Badgeville clients to design unique smart gamification programs.

About Badgeville

Badgeville, the leading Social Loyalty Platform, makes it easy for business leaders, marketers and innovative technologists to use smart gamification techniques to increase user loyalty and engagement across eCommerce, Media & Entertainment, Health, Education, Services and Enterprise web & mobile experiences. Using Badgeville, brands can reward users with real-time achievements and reputation, while at the same time driving user behavior, achieving specific business goals, and measuring and optimizing user engagement. Badgeville customers include NBC, Bluefly, Interscope Records, TechCrunch, Major League Gaming, Deloitte Digital, and The Active Network. Founded in 2010, Badgeville is based in Menlo Park, California and has offices in New York and Europe. For more information, visit Badgeville on the web @ www.badgeville.com