EdgeTier raises €6m in Series A round led by Smedvig Capital
EdgeTier, who help customer contact centres improve customer experience using AI, announces today that it has raised €6 million in Series A funding in a round led by Smedvig Capital, with participation from Episode 1 and Act Venture Capital.
EdgeTier’s AI platform ushers in a new era of customer experience management, giving 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 is hugely difficult as existing toolsets are complex to operate, not real-time focussed, and have no machine learning capabilities to support advanced analysis.
With EdgeTier, contact centres get a deep understanding of customer attitudes and can detect even subtle issues in real-time, which could otherwise have gone unrecognised and unaddressed. The SaaS platform leverages natural language processing to monitor customer conversations across all channels, 24/7, in multilingual environments.
EdgeTier works ‘out of the box’ with just a one-hour setup, and can easily plug into a contact centre’s existing customer service software, such as Zendesk, Kustomer, Intercom, Salesforce, LivePerson and others. EdgeTier applies proprietary AI and machine learning techniques to extract insights from every customer conversation in real-time, which is used 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
Increasing appetite for automation in the contact centre is driving significant demand for EdgeTier’s technology. Having already achieved an impressive 3.5X growth through 2022, the new funding will allow EdgeTier to grow its headcount from 22 people to 70 across its Irish and Spanish bases over the coming 24 months. The team is hiring across product, commercial, and operations functions to meet an ambitious product roadmap.
EdgeTier was founded in 2015 by Dr. Shane Lynn, Dr. Bart Lehane, and Ciarán Tobin. With backgrounds in data science, software engineering, and machine learning, the EdgeTier co-founders shared a vision to build user-friendly, machine learning infused applications that move contact centres from data-rich but information-poor environments into a new era of efficiency and performance.
With 100% customer retention, EdgeTier is trusted by some of the world’s leading customer-centric brands across retail, travel, gaming and fintech. The company operates in more than 20 countries across Europe and the Americas, processing billions of messages through their systems for household-name clients, including Abercrombie & Fitch, LoveHolidays, Holiday Extras, CarTrawler, RyanAir, TUI Travel, Electric Ireland, Tipico, and Betclic.
Dr. Shane Lynn, CEO and co-founder of EdgeTier, comments: “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, comments: “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 position us to capitalise on a global opportunity during a rapidly changing AI and customer experience landscape.”
Joe Knowles, Partner at Smedvig Capital, comments: “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.”
