With more customer service requirements transitioning to the digital domain, companies creating tools for managing burgeoning demand in this space are reaping the rewards already. Glia, which develops AI-backed solutions for customer service, enabling agents to talk to customers through voice, video, email, messaging, and Chatbots (along with screen-shares for maximum hands-on assistance), has just finalized its new funding round, namely a Series D round that saw it raise $45 million. The company has now touched $1 billion in total valuation as per insightlundentechcrunch. This was spearheaded by Insight Partners in collaboration with Wildcat Capital Management and a new investor, namely RingCentral, the behemoth dealing in business communications. The earlier two investors were already existing backers at the company, participating in the company’s Series C funding round in January last year that saw $78 million being raised. The company is headquartered in New York City, with a big team at Tallinn, Estonia, as well. It has now raised more than $150 million cumulatively.
Glia first built its reputation as a provider of CRM solutions for finance industry players and most of its customers come from this business segment. It has more than 250 credit unions, banks and insurance companies using its CRM solutions and enabling customer-service divisions to take questions. The company will use its funds for research and development and will be developing more tech tools that deploy AI and cutting-edge analytics for backing direct interactions of customer service teams with customers, helping them take basic questions for support, while also screen-sharing with customers for use cases, taking them through problems and also navigating customers towards solving issues.
The company has already covered 10 billion+ interactions, creating a sizable database that is used for developing and training its ML (machine-learning) based algorithms. Glia will also deploy investments into advancing its voice, messaging and video-based solutions. Glia will also be beefing up its business development operations, expanding its presence worldwide. RingCentral is already publicly funded and has hundreds of MNC customers and Glia will be developing services to cater to their requirements as well.
CEO at Glia, Dan Michaeli, who co-founded the entity with CTO Carlos Paniagua and COO Justin Di Pietro, stated that the pandemic drove up customer demand for the company’s services, with more business being done online. This also led to revenues scaling up by a whopping 150% between 2020-21. He also opined that customer service is not likely to shift from digital channels in the aftermath of the pandemic. Digital is always going to be the future for customer service according to Michaeli and he also stated that entities not digitizing and modernizing their engagement and support functions are already falling behind. He talked of how the company is pleased with the confidence of its investors in its capabilities although there is a lot more to do. He also talked of how the funds will help the company widen its reach while enabling more global companies to transform their digital connections with customers.
