DETROIT – An internal ePrize company that developed a gamification application for use with Salesforce.Com received a $1 million investment from Detroit Venture Partners and will be nurtured at the downtown Detroit incubator.

LevelEleven?s flagship product is the sales gamification app, Contest Builder. First used at ePrize to motivate its own sales team, Contest Builder was developed by a team run by 13-year ePrize veteran Bob Marsh, who is its first CEO. Josh Linkner, CEO and Managing Partner of DVP has joined the board. The company also hired Kevin O?Hara, a seasoned Salesforce cloud-computing and web developer, as Vice President Engineering.

?What we did was implement Salesforce.Com at ePrize,? Marsh said. ?Then we used Contest Builder to manage ePrize?s sales organization. We kept track of their conversations, meetings, how sales opportunities were progressing. It resulted in a big behavior change for the sales team. The classic way to motivate sales executives is through contests.?

Marsh said he enlisted the help of a couple of ePrize engineers to build the software. It was launched a year ago at a Salesforce.Com convention. Since then, local beta testers have included Comcast and the Detroit Pistons. Once ePrize realized it had a separate company on its hands, the top brass also realized it wasn?t the best company to take LevelEleven to the next level.

?We let Bob create a skunk works within ePrize,? said ePrize CEO Matt Wise. ?We reached out to our contacts. Contest Builder started to grow. About six months ago we said we need to turn this into a real business. We realized it would take a lot more capital to continue its growth.?

Enter Detroit Venture Partners.

?We strongly felt it would be better with it independent,? Wise said. ?Now Bob is inside Detroit Venture Partners. ePrize just couldn?t provide that level of nurturing.?

There, of course, is a natural connection between the two companies. ePrize was founded by Linkner, DVP?s CEO. Linkner?s biggest investor in ePrize was Dan Gilbert of Rock Financial fame. Gilbert is also a major investor in DVP. Now LevelEleven has become DVP?s biggest investment to date.

Located in the Madison Building, LevelEleven is continuing to hire for its sales and development teams. For more information, click on LevelEleven.Com