When DigitalGenius participated in the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield competition in New York City in 2015, there weren’t a lot of companies working on AI and machine learning. Today, it’s become much more commonplace, and the company announced a $14.75 million Series A.
Global Founders Capital led the round. MMC Ventures, Paua Ventures and several other unnamed new investors also participated They also got help from previous investors Salesforce Ventures, Runa Capital, RRE Ventures, Lumia Capital, Compound and Lerer Hippeau Ventures. Today’s investment brings the total to $26 million, according to the company.
DigitalGenius may have been ahead of its time, but the market is finally catching up. Company president and chief strategy officer Mikhail Naumov says the startup has been growing in leaps and bounds going from just two customers last year to 30 this year.
Customers include KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, Unilever, Eurostar and Soylent. Just this year, the company landed its first government customer, which hopes to use DigitalGenius to improve its citizen outreach.
The product uses machine learning and natural language processing to build a lexicon of common customer service interactions for each business using old text and email interactions as training material. In this way, it learns typical kinds of questions and can begin to build reasonable responses.
But DigitalGenius doesn’t see the technology as the be all and end all here. A customer service representative can work with DigitalGenius technology to form a human-technology team. The technology can take the interaction as far as possible before passing off to a human or it can work with the human in the customer service software, offering responses and allowing the CSR to customize the response before sending the email or text.
The company, which has offices in the US and London, wants to use the new capital infusion to expand further. Naumov says the company has hired a chief revenue and they want to grow the number of employees from 60 by around 30-50 percent in the coming year. The exact number will depend on how well they continue to grow, he said.
