David Karandish has been busy.
capabilityhis support automation company, planned a $5 million “bridging round” to assist the corporate break even. But TVC Capital, Toloka.vc and the corporate's other backers had something larger in mind. So they invested one other $21 million in Capacity's $26 million Series D.
While all this was happening, Capacity acquired three firms: enterprise search firm Lucy (which had raised $5.6 million) and two startups focused on customer support automation, Linc and Envision.
“It's an exciting time of change at Capacity as we grow to assist brands more automate interactions with customers and team members,” Karandish told TechCrunch. “We are at an inflection point for AI and plenty of firms are realizing that they need an entire platform to achieve success, reasonably than cobbling together a series of point solutions.”
Karandish co-founded Capacity with Chris Sims in 2017 as a part of Equity.com's incubator program. After the $900 million exit from Answers.com (which Karandish also co-founded), Karandish wanted to start out an organization to deal with what he saw as the most important customer support roadblocks.
“Rising costs are putting pressure on support teams to do more with less,” Karandish said. “At the identical time, consumer expectations are rapidly changing in order that while consumers want self-service, they’re increasingly frustrated by lackluster experiences. Our goal with Capacity is to supply an important customer experience while recognizing that in lots of cases turning to a human is the correct thing to do.”
Capacity connects to a corporation's tech stack to reply queries and automate support tasks. The platform mines information from files, apps like Gmail, customer relationship management software, and more to construct a knowledge base from which Capacity's chatbot and help desk tools can draw.
Employees can ask Capacity’s chatbot questions like “What was added to the merger agreement yesterday?” and even instruct it to update the status of a sales lead, for instance. The chatbot and help desk can even deliver company-wide announcements similar to news and event notifications. And they could be designed to be externally facing (with filters to cover sensitive data, mind you) and embedded into an organization's website to reply common customer questions.
“For us, Capacity means the convenience of use of a tool like Zendesk with the automation capabilities of ServiceNow,” Karandish said. “In terms of approach, we follow a really similar playbook to Parker Conrad's 'Compound Model' – except in our case we deal with support.”
Innovations in self-service software – including AI – are making it a more attractive solution for businesses than previously. For example, Cleverly.ai – which Zendesk acquired in August 2022 – finds answers to customer questions by constructing a layer of information about applications. Meanwhile, Direct relies on algorithms trained by subject material experts to strategically answer customer issues across quite a lot of different messaging channels.
Customers like self-service options. After According to a Zendesk survey, 67% prefer it to interacting with customer support. But they could be difficult to get right. A gardener Opinion poll found that on average, only 14% of customer support and support issues are resolved entirely through self-service.
Capacity will improve and expand its product portfolio through recent acquisitions.
Karandish sees Lucy's offering, which ingests and analyzes data from enterprise applications and systems, as a complement to Capacity's existing indexing technology. Envision, in turn, will help Capacity customers flag unresolved chats and calls and train human agents. And Linc will bring self-service tools for retail and e-commerce to Capacity, Karandish said.
Lucy co-founders Dan Mallin, Scott Litman and Marc Dispensa are scheduled to hitch Ability to steer the combination of products and teams. Rodney Kuhn, CEO of Envision, will oversee contact center solutions at Capacity, and Fang Cheng, founder and CEO of Linc, will lead Capacity's e-commerce efforts.
To date, Capacity has acquired firms – the opposite five are Textel, LumenVox, Denim Social, SmartAction and Cereproc – and raised greater than $89 million.
Karandish said the most recent tranche shall be used to expand Capacity's headcount to 200 employees by the tip of the 12 months because the Saint Louis-based company is “on the trail to profitability.” Capacity's customer base now includes over 2,500 brands, he added, while annual recurring revenue is sort of $50 million.
“Our growth strategy reflects what our customers demand: an all-in-one AI platform that delivers across all communication channels,” he added. “We have identified 24 steps of the shopper experience which might be ripe for support automation… With each acquisition, specific technologies and talent are added to assist Capacity change into a number one provider of AI-powered customer and worker experience solutions .”
