Vitally Closes $30 Million Series B Round for Customer Success Platform
Vitally, the New York City-based provider of a customer success platform (CSP), secured $30 million in Series B funding to accelerate product innovation for business-to-business (B2B) customer success teams and expand its global reach. Specifically, the new capital infusion will be used to bring innovative and new features to the platform, hire product and engineering talent, and spur global go-to-market expansion.
Company officials describe Vitally as being the first CSP specifically designed for maximizing productivity and collaboration. “Vitally is the first Customer Success Platform to centralize all the capabilities you expect from best-in-class productivity tools with all of your customer data from across the stack,” says Jamie Davidson, founder and CEO of Vitally. In general, CSPs provide capabilities to create a unified, 360-degree view of the customer and monitor customer health while also driving proactive engagement.
The funding round was led by Next47, the Palo Alto, California-based venture firm built for enterprise founders, with participation from new investors HubSpot Ventures and NewView Capital. Additional investors include Andreessen Horowitz, which led Vitally’s Series A round.
Saudi Arabia-Based PalmHR Raises $5 Million to Expand Across MENA
PalmHR, a Saudi Arabian human resources (HR) firm that automates payroll, tracks worker leaves, and monitors employee performance, has secured $5 million in a pre-Series A round to facilitate the company’s expansion into Egypt and to other countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. The new round of funding was led by Speedinvest, the European venture capital fund for tech startups that is based in Vienna, Austria.
PalmHR says it is on a mission to transform HR technology and offer a better employee experience, including onboarding and offboarding processes, in the region. “We want to merge HR-tech with fintech and insurtech for employees to be able to do everything, like purchase or rent assets, sign up for health or travel insurance, within our solution,” says PalmHR CEO Richard Schrems, who founded the company in 2019. “We want to make PalmHR a part of employees’ daily lives.”
In Saudi Arabia, PalmHR technology has been integrated into a few government services, including Mudad, a digital payroll payment processing system mandated by the country’s labor ministry; the General Organization for Social Insurance (GOSI), the Saudi agency in charge of social insurance in the country; and Muqeem, the digital portal for facilitating the official documentation of Saudi residents and for providing data to employers on their resident workers.
Schrems says that because of integration with Saudi government mechanisms, the systems of PalmHR can be used by the company’s customers to hand out payroll to their employees, apply for a visa, and update people on their social insurance levels.
Ushur Lands $50 Million for Its CX Automation Platform
Ushur, the Santa Clara, California-based provider of an AI-powered CX automation platform, raised $50 million in Series C funding aimed at expanding its experience automation portfolio, developing new innovations in AI, and moving the company into new regions and industry verticals. The round was led by Third Point Ventures, the New York City-based capital arm of the hedge fund Third Point Management, with participation coming from existing investors Iron Pillar from India; 8VC from Austin, Texas; Aflac Ventures from Columbus, Georgia; and Pentland Ventures from London.
Ushur says it has the world’s first AI-powered CX automation platform purpose-built from the ground up to automate entire customer journeys end to end. With AI at its core, the platform uses conversational AI, language intelligence, and document understanding to deliver industry-specific, personalized CX solutions. Some of the money raised in the latest funding round will go toward enhancing the platform with transformative new technologies that include Large Language Models (LLMs) and Generative AI.
The company has met with success in the last 12 months, tripling its headcount, doubling the customer base, and achieving Net Revenue Retention (NRR) of 164% as enterprises adopt AI-driven automation solutions built for customer engagement applications.
“The previous generation of enterprise automation was designed for infrastructure processes,” says Simha Sadasiva, CEO and co-founder of Ushur. “We built Ushur’s AI platform with a different goal in mind: to provide excellent customer experiences at scale and to deliver meaningful interactions that put the customer’s needs at the center. Our success is a direct result of the value created for the enterprise with a focus on the customer experience, which continues to shape our technology, our strategy, and our culture.”
ChangeEngine Announces $5.5 Million Seed Funding to Scale EX Platform
Workplace technology solution firm ChangeEngine raised $5.5 million in seed funding to scale its employee experience (EX) platform. The funding round was led by Struck Capital and joined by Bonfire Ventures, Builders VC, and Forward Partners.
In the hybrid work environment, San Francisco, California-based ChangeEngine helps companies treat their employees like internal customers by synchronizing with their employee data, creating employee persona segments to drive high-value communications, designing engaging visual content that aligns the external and internal brand, and empowering companies to launch best-in-class workplace initiatives faster with their hand-curated template library.
Launching its platform in May 2022, the company since then has continued to experience significant growth, including a 9x increase in net new customers and annual recurring revenue in less than six months.
With its seed funding proceeds, ChangeEngine plans to build modern AI into its platform to democratize idea generation, visual design, tonal variations, and predictive insights. ChangeEngine is also continuing to grow its product, engineering, and go-to-market teams.
Securing £1.6 Million, HR and Talent Provider Gigged.AI Has Something to Offer
AI-driven talent platform provider Gigged.AI has secured £1.6 million ($1.9 million) in a seed round led by Par Equity alongside existing investors Techstart Ventures and Nile HQ.
The successful raise comes as Glasgow, Scotland-based Gigged.AI is set to scale its HR tech capabilities while companies in the UK struggle with hiring freezes and staff retention in the current economic climate. However, Gigged.AI CEO and co-founder Rich Wilson says the company has something to offer: Gigged.AI can deploy AI-matching algorithms to help businesses source and onboard on-demand tech talent, while enabling larger corporate entities to retain existing staff.
Two workforce trends also stand out, Wilson says. Among Gen Z, nearly 2 out of 3 engage in freelance work. And within the company’s own talent community on the platform, 70% have second jobs.
“The companies in our client base are experiencing these trends first-hand and now have much better visibility for what skills they have in-house, and where they need to add talent, or upskill it,” Wilson says. “We have a best-of-class product, which is pioneering, as we have both an open and internal talent marketplace—the first time (that) the companies we are working with have had access to this kind of dual platform.”
Par Equity partner Paul Atkinson calls what Wilson and his team have built “a remarkable achievement.”
Gigged.AI plans to expand its team in the next 12 months, remotely in addition to its Glasgow and London hubs, and has a number of partnerships and contract wins in the pipeline this year.
Author Information
Alex is responsible for writing about trends and changes that are impacting the customer experience market. He had served as Principal Editor at Village Intelligence, a Los Angeles-based consultancy on technology impacting healthcare and healthcare-related industries. Alex was also Associate Director for Content Management at Omdia and Informa Tech, where he produced white papers, executive summaries, market insights, blogs, and other key content assets. His areas of coverage spanned the sectors grouped under the technology vertical, including semiconductors, smart technologies, enterprise & IT, media, displays, mobile, power, healthcare, China research, industrial and IoT, automotive, and transformative technologies.
At IHS Markit, he was Managing Editor of the company’s flagship IHS Quarterly, covering aerospace & defense, economics & country risk, chemicals, oil & gas, and other IHS verticals. He was Principal Editor of analyst output at iSuppli Corp. and Managing Editor of Market Watch, a fortnightly newsletter highlighting significant analyst report findings for pitching to the media. He started his career in writing as an Editor-Reporter for The Associated Press.
