rready Ships Companies a Kit That Turns Employees Into Intrapreneurs

01 /The Concept

rready sells companies a physical box – and then builds a program around it. The box contains a structured entrepreneurship curriculum, paper canvas templates for mapping business ideas, and a set of cards that function as a kind of internal currency: employees can "spend" them to claim working hours from colleagues or from an external specialist network provided by rready.

The core idea is intrapreneurship – a word that stitches together "entrepreneur" and "intra," meaning an employee with entrepreneurial instincts whose talent can be channeled toward company goals rather than side projects.

The online platform is the other half of the model. It hosts an employee idea board where colleagues can discover each other's projects, offer feedback, or volunteer to help. A marketplace layer lists available skills and hours: user interviews, prototype design, technical development, marketing planning, or legal support. rready also runs periodic events where intrapreneurs from different companies meet to share experience, seek advice, or explore partnerships at both the individual and company level.

Founded in Switzerland, rready claims over 1,000 companies across the world have adopted its methodology. The company recently closed a $4M round, adding to the $2.1M raised in 2021.

02 /Why It Matters

The talent shortage in skilled roles has pushed employers toward retention strategies that would have seemed unusual a few years ago. Fitness competitions between team members, beer-tasting team events, online trivia nights – companies are paying for all of it. GoJoe ([covered here](/review/kompanii-stali-pokupat-chelovecheskie-otnoshenija)) reports that its fitness competition platform improved employees' perception of their employer by 84% and strengthened social ties between colleagues by 91%, on $1.3M raised. Online team experiences from Confetti ([reviewed here](/review/vdrug-nachali-platit)) and Teamraderie are in the same market, with $6.3M and $9M raised respectively.

rready belongs in this category despite its more serious framing. Two of the three outcomes it promises companies are standard employee engagement metrics: increased overall engagement and improved employer brand for recruiting. Only one outcome connects directly to intrapreneurship itself – the effect of employee initiatives on new business development.

Groopit, [covered in May](/review/neochevidnoe-sledstvie-pooshhrenie-iniciativy), addresses the same underlying need from a different angle: a structured feedback platform that routes employees' competitive intelligence and product ideas to decision-makers. That raised $12.8M. Elqano ([covered here](/review/kak-najti-togo-kto-nuzhen)) and Beatrust occupy adjacent territory, building competency maps that help employees find colleagues with the right skills for specific tasks. Beatrust raised $9.1M.

What connects rready, Groopit, Beatrust, and Elqano is that they're all, at bottom, responses to the same structural shift: the loosening of employee-employer ties as remote work becomes normal, and the resulting need for explicit infrastructure to maintain connection and leverage distributed talent.

03 /Opportunities

rready's most distinctive argument isn't that employee ideas are valuable – that's conventional wisdom. It's the emphasis on execution over ideation. Anyone can pitch a concept; fewer people can move one toward reality. Companies that signal they value initiative-taking over idea-sharing attract and retain a different type of employee than those that run suggestion boxes.

The contrast with beer tastings and fitness challenges is worth taking seriously as a positioning argument. Those activities create momentary connection. A structured intrapreneurship program creates ongoing stakes – participants have something real to work toward, and the company gets actual output in return. The value exchange is more durable, which likely means lower churn among engaged employees and a stronger employer brand signal to candidates who care about meaningful work.

For builders, the opportunity is platforms that improve employee engagement and retention by developing professional initiative – either by supporting employees' own entrepreneurial projects, as rready does, or by routing their energy toward the company's own strategic challenges, as Groopit does. The market for this is validated and growing. If companies are already paying for team beer tastings, the willingness to pay for something that simultaneously increases engagement and generates business value is structurally higher. The entry bet worth making is on the side of substance over entertainment.