Smedvig Capital lead €6m Series A investment in EdgeTier to meet growing demand for real-time AI analytics in the contact centre
Today we are delighted to announce our investment in EdgeTier, whose AI-powered analytics are ushering in a new era of customer experience management in the contact centre. Episode 1 and Act Venture Capital also participated in the Series A round.
Background
EdgeTier gives unlimited access and real-time insights on customer conversational data to support a higher quality customer experience, and in turn drive customer acquisition and retention. This task has to date been hugely difficult for contact centres as existing toolsets are complex to operate, not real-time focussed, and have no machine learning capabilities to support advanced analysis. In fact, over 80% of alerts from the EdgeTier system are raised before customer service teams were even aware of an issue.
EdgeTier was founded by Dr. Shane Lynn, Dr. Bart Lehane and Ciarán Tobin, who had a vision to build cutting-edge AI applications that move contact centres into a new era of efficiency and performance. The founders recognised that by applying AI and machine learning to extract insights from every customer conversation in real-time, they could help customer care organisations deliver higher-quality and more personalised interactions, while also reducing the cost to serve those customers.
Working ‘out of the box,’ the EdgeTier system sits on top of existing customer platforms, such as Zendesk, Kustomer and Salesforce, and monitors text-based conversations 24/7 in up to 60 European languages. This enables customer experience leaders to:
· React faster to problems by identifying real-time changes in conversation topics
· Reduce the strain on agents by automatically labelling conversation topics and customer sentiment at a sentence-by-sentence level
· Dramatically improve agent training and coaching with AI-powered analysis of all interactions
· Reduce handling times and improve first-contact resolution by assisting agents during their customer conversations using automation and suggested responses
Why EdgeTier and why now?
1. In a €7bn Global Market, we believe EdgeTier has the potential to create and lead the category of “contact centre data layer.”
2. The out of the box product makes a real and immediate impact on contact centre productivity — delivering 20%+ improvements day-one. This strong ROI is one of the reasons for Edge Tier’s 100% customer retention rate.
3. EdgeTier is trusted by some of the world’s leading customer-centric brands across retail, travel, gaming and fintech, including the likes of Abercrombie & Fitch, LoveHolidays, and RyanAir.
4. Shane, Bart and Ciarán have the depth of technical knowledge to be true pioneers of AI in the contact centre — with two PHDs and decades of data science and machine learning experience between them. They are also commercially astute, achieving impressive 3.5x growth through 2022, on very little capital. Their work rate and intelligent approach is inspiring, and we are delighted to work hard alongside them to achieve their ambitious vision.
Joe Knowles, Partner at Smedvig Capital, commented: “We’ve been impressed with EdgeTier from day one. The company has achieved an extraordinary rate of growth on very little capital. The quality of its team is key to this; the founders have the AI expertise and commercial acumen needed to continue landing new clients and leading the way on product innovation. We’re at the beginning of a wave of AI-enabled improvements to customer service, and EdgeTier is well positioned to lead this category to become the de facto data solution for contact centres. The fact that EdgeTier has not lost a single customer to date and has an upsell rate of 150% is evidence that innovative and customer-centric brands are embracing the solution and unlocking tangible value from AI right now.”
Dr. Shane Lynn, CEO and Co-founder of EdgeTier, added: “Companies will simply not be able to compete without AI and machine learning augmenting their ability to understand and support their customers at scale. We want to help more contact centres and customer experience professionals recover the missed insights in their conversations, react faster to changes, and have the data they need at their fingertips to make decisions. Over the fundraise, we’ve been really impressed with the Smedvig team; Joe and Maeve are already bringing great value to the business and I’m really excited to partner with them now on the journey ahead.”
Dr. Bart Lehane, CRO and Co-founder of EdgeTier, said: “This funding round allows us to deliver our ambitious product road map and scale to meet the growing demand for our platform in the market. We’ve had a great experience working with Smedvig; it was a natural fit, and this investment and partnership positions us to capitalise on a global opportunity during a rapidly changing AI and customer experience landscape.”
