About

Venly is a for-profit social enterprise serving community ecosystems from its operations center in Cambridge, MA. Venly provides open source-enabled Member Oriented Management Systems. The platform expands Open edX to provide a AI & big data-supported system that enables ecosystems to connect and collaborate for innovation, growth, and resilience. Venly integrates an open source network at mass scale that simplifies collaboration for even the smallest businesses as community stakeholders. The platform connects small & local businesses across communities worldwide and measures their gains as individual enterprises and as members of various ecosystems. The name Venly itself is derived from the Venn diagram of community and technology in a user-friendly system (ven+ly=Venly). Venly’s mission is to help local businesses grow, create jobs, and strengthen each community Venly serves.

The team behind Venly brings together longevity and a track record of deploying large scale systems. Venly grew out of Benchmarking Partners, which was best known for developing Walmart’s first Internet-based supplier collaboration system. The Benchmarking team worked with retailers worldwide to put that specification into open source, where it became the first business-to-business internet commerce standard. The Benchmarking team that became Venly continued work with Walmart leaders who were hired by Amazon to build out Amazon Web Services and other key Amazon capabilities.

The average length that Venly team members have worked together is more than 12 years. As part of Benchmarking’s experience, the Venly team worked with many leaders who became Venly’s Founding Partners (e.g., Venly Founding Chair, Andrea Jung – longtime CEO of Avon and current CEO of Grameen America; Venly Executive Chair, Paul Horn – longtime Senior Vice President of IBM Global Research, where he pioneered the Watson AI System; Venly Co-Chair for Training, Vice Admiral David Brewer, ret. – former Vice Chief of Naval Education and Superintendent of L.A. Unified School District).