Matt Greeley

Founder & CEO Brightidea

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Matt Greeley is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Brightidea, a San Francisco company he started in 1999 that sells software for managing corporate innovation as a pipeline rather than as a suggestion box. The distinction is the whole business: large organizations have never lacked ideas, they have lacked a mechanism for moving an idea from someone’s head through evaluation, funding, and development to a measurable commercial result, with visibility into where it stalled. Brightidea launched what it describes as the first online innovation platform in 2000 and built its category around that pipeline framing, working with GE, Bosch, American Express, Adobe, and Cisco. Greeley reached it after a career that began at a hedge fund and included an enterprise software company acquired eight months after founding.

Career Highlights

• Founded Brightidea in 1999 and leads it as CEO, launching what the company describes as the first online innovation platform in 2000.
• Built a leading provider of on-demand Innovation Pipeline Management software, used by GE, Bosch, American Express, Adobe, and Cisco among others.
• Co-founded Alyanza Software, acquired by Niku eight months after founding with triple-digit returns to early investors.
• Consulted for Wrenchead.com, helping raise capital at a $100 million valuation from Polaris Ventures, Goldman Sachs, and CBS Corporation.
• Began his career at FMK Advisors, an East Coast hedge fund.
• Holds a degree in computer engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology, with later study in creativity and marketing at Stanford.

Professional Journey

Greeley took a degree in computer engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology and began his career on the East Coast at FMK Advisors, a hedge fund, where he worked in marketing and fundraising rather than in engineering. He later studied creativity and marketing at Stanford — an unusual combination of technical training, capital-raising experience, and formal study of creativity that maps closely onto the business he would build.

He moved into Silicon Valley enterprise software as a co-founder of Alyanza Software, which was acquired by Niku eight months after its founding, returning triple-digit gains to its early investors. He subsequently consulted for Wrenchead.com during the dot-com period, helping the company raise capital at a $100 million valuation from investors including Polaris Ventures, Goldman Sachs, and CBS Corporation.

He founded Brightidea in 1999 and launched its online innovation platform the following year. The idea of soliciting employee suggestions was not new; what was missing was everything after the suggestion. Most corporate innovation programmes collected ideas enthusiastically and then lost them, because no one owned the process of evaluating, funding, and tracking them, and because there was no way to demonstrate a return that would justify continuing. Brightidea’s response was to model innovation explicitly as a pipeline with stages, owners, and metrics — the same discipline a sales organization applies to leads — so that a company could see how many ideas entered, where they died, and what the survivors eventually earned.

That framing gave the category its name, Innovation Pipeline Management, and gave large enterprises a way to run innovation as an accountable function. More than 300 companies adopted the platform, including GE, Bosch, American Express, Adobe, and Cisco, using it to run both internal idea programmes and open challenges to outside contributors. Greeley has also applied the product to its own maker, running each release inside Brightidea for a year before releasing it to customers.

Education

Stevens Institute of Technology

Degree, Computer Engineering

Stanford University

Study, Creativity and Marketing