Online services are being used to satisfy an increasing number of customer needs, which has led to an increase in the visibility of those who are developing the tools needed to do so.
Glia has closed a new round of fundraising, a Series D of $45 million, bringing the company’s valuation to over $1 billion.
Glia develops an AI-based client service platform that enables advisors to deal with clients via a variety of channels,and chatbots, and then to screen share to give those clients hands-on assistance.
The round was co-led by Insight Partners, Wildcat Capital Management, and new strategic backer RingCentral, a leader in unified business communications.
Former investors Insight and Wildcat contributed to Glia’s $78 million Series C financing in January 2021. The company, which has its headquarters in New York and a sizable team in Tallinn, Estonia, has now amassed more than $150 million in total funding, according to its announcement.
Glia initially gained notoriety by offering CRM technologies to the finance sector, and it still has the majority of its clients in that sector.
More than 250 banks, credit unions, insurance firms, and other providers of financial services, according to the company, use its tools to assist their customer service representatives in responding to support requests and, given how closely customer service and sales are now connected, potentially upsell customers to additional services.
The financing will primarily support R&D, as it did in the last round. In particular, Glia intends to develop more tools that make use of analytics and AI to assist customer service representatives in their direct work with clients — both to assist them with basic support questions and in those instances where they screen share with clients to get guided through a problem and then navigate them to fixing an issue.
It claimed to have handled over 10 billion interactions to date, creating a sizable data set that is utilized to train and improve its machine learning algorithms. Additionally, Glia will spend on improving its messaging, audio, and video products.
Additionally, Glia will invest in business development to increase its global reach. Since publicly traded RingCentral has hundreds of international clients, Glia will probably invest more in developing services to cater to that international clientele.
Dan Michaeli, the CEO of Glia and co-founder of the company along with Carlos Paniagua, the CTO, and Justin DiPietro, the COO, told last year that the pandemic gave his company a major boost.
As more transactions were made online, it was only natural that customer support would follow suit. As a result, between 2020 and 2021, revenues rose by 150%.
Customer service is unlikely to move away from those digital channels once the globe calms down in the wake of COVID-19 becoming entrenched and something he can live with, he said.
He declared in a statement that those who haven’t yet modernized their support and engagement methods are already falling behind. They are overjoyed by the faith their investors have shown in the round’s value because they know they have only begun to explore Glia’s potential.
Their quick expansion and fruitful partnerships with several financial services firms show how critical digital customer service is nowadays. This funding will enable them to further expand their reach and assist more companies all over the world in reimagining how they connect with customers digitally as they build on a decade of innovation.
Even if a consumer chooses to dial a number and speak with a representative over the phone to learn more about a good or service, they will in fact do it with “their screens in front of them,” as he described it in the previous year.
Glia has attracted investors thus far due to its integrated strategy and emphasis on providing tech-based web to make the transition from one to the other simple for all different types of consumers.
According to Lonne Jaffe, MD of Insight Partners, digital communication is essential as businesses digitize all of their processes and services, and Glia is setting the standard for how to digitally change customer service.
Because of the company’s tremendous growth, momentum, and the enormity of the market opportunity, they are spending more in it.
Also, read more about:
Faq’s
2012
Dan Michaeli
Series D
$45 Million
More than $1 billion
