EdgeTier raises €6m in Series A round led by Smedvig Capital

This funding will enable us to meet the growing demand for our real-time AI analytics platform and continue to help companies deliver unrivalled customer experience using their conversational data.

We are delighted to announce that we have raised €6 million in Series A funding in a round led by Smedvig Capital, with participation from Episode 1 and Act Venture Capital. This fundraise is a significant milestone in the EdgeTier journey and will accelerate us on the mission to ushers in a new era of customer experience management, giving unlimited access and real-time insights on customer conversational data to our customers.

Why is EdgeTier needed?

Time and time again, we’ve seen customer teams struggling in a world with thousands of data points, but struggling to understand what is happening, where they are going wrong, or what do to next.

Time and time again, we see customer teams who are:

• Trying to improve their core metrics by guessing at what the problems are and hoping their changes fix them.
• Spending vast amounts of time manually analysing customer conversations, trying to find a needle of insight in the haystack of Excel.
• Losing customers because they can’t use the hugely valuable customer feedback contained within their support conversations.
• Basing an agent’s review on manual analysis of 1% of their work.
• Delivering customer service that doesn’t do it’s core function of serving customers.

EdgeTier’s platform turns those customer teams into insight-driven, efficiency machines. Through our groundbreaking use of AI, customer facing teams can react to emerging issues immediately, understand sources of customer frustration in fine-grained detail, monitor agent behaviour, and deliver perfect responses to customers every time.

What does EdgeTier do?

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. Our SaaS platform leverages natural language processing to monitor customer conversations across all channels, 24/7, in multilingual environments.

We’ve worked incredibly hard to ensure that EdgeTier works ‘out of the box’ with just a one-hour setup and zero IT effort. We plug into existing customer service software, ingest conversational or survey data as it occurs, and then apply AI and machine learning techniques to extract insights from every customer conversation in real-time. There are existing integrations for systems such as Zendesk, LivePerson, Kustomer, Salesforce, LiveAgent and others.

The platform has solutions for customer facing teams that want 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

Why raise funds now?

Increased focus on customer experience and increasing appetite for automation in the contact centre is driving significant demand for EdgeTier’s technology. With a laser focus on product-market fit, we’ve achieved 3.5X growth through 2022 and have onboarded major customers with outstanding results. There’s a huge opportunity and demand for our product, and we’re only at the beginning of the journey.

This new funding will allow us to grow the team by 50 across our Irish and Spanish bases over the coming 24 months. Check out our Careers page if you’re interested in joining a dynamic team at an exciting time – we are hiring across product, commercial, and operations functions to meet an ambitious product roadmap.

With 100% customer retention, we are proud to be trusted by some of the world’s leading customer-centric brands across retail, travel, gaming and fintech. EdgeTier has customers 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.

We’re delighted to be partnering with Smedvig Capital, who’ve joined our existing investors Episode1 and ACT Venture Capital in this round. Smedvig were a natural fit for EdgeTier, and have been great to work with over our fundraising journey. There’s also a huge thank you and proud moment for our current team, who’ve built an amazing product and commercial model with us; it’s incredibly exciting to think of what we’ll achieve next, and we look forward to that journey eagerly!

Shane, Bart, and Ciarán

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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.”

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About EdgeTier

EdgeTier enables contact centres to improve their customer experience with AI. Its advanced AI platform analyses conversational data in real-time to offer a deep understanding of customer attitudes, detect subtle issues as they arise, and improve agent performance with assisted responses and training based on more extensive performance analysis. The out-of-the-box system integrates with existing customer support platforms to consistently monitor customer conversations across all channels and in multilingual environments. Based in Dublin, EdgeTier was founded by Shane Lynn PhD, Bart Lehane PhD, and Ciarán Tobin, and has grown to 22 employees serving clients across Europe and America.

About Smedvig Capital

Since 1996 Smedvig Capital has partnered with and helped scale over 75 companies. Leading Series A/B rounds, we are passionate about finding and investing in the best, fast-growing B2B businesses across the UK, Nordics, and the Netherlands. We work closely with a small number of high-quality teams and build strong relationships with our founders. We’re not afraid to roll up our sleeves and be there for our portfolio when and how we’re needed through the inevitable ups and downs of growing a business. We’re a flexible source of capital supporting and accelerating ambition with a long-term view, we understand that great things can take time.