Customer service platform Glia gets $20m funding
Glia, the digital customer engagement platform for financial services, has raised $20 million a Series B funding round led by Insight Venture Partners, and taking the firm’s total capital to $29 million, reports David Penn at Finovate.
Glia gladly glides to get that funding
The company will use the funds to get bigger, adding to its product development, sales, solutions, and marketing organisations and infrastructure. Glia co-founder and CEO Dan Michaeli praised Insight’s record of collaborating with “best-in-class SaaS companies” and made a direct connection between the firm’s investment with Glia’s growth plans.
“By adding an investor as strong and experienced as Insight, we are poised to rapidly expand Glia’s market reach,” Michaeli says.
Glia specialises in helping companies maximise the way they engage with their customers. Its digital communications platform enables businesses to leverage messaging, video, co-browsing, artificial intelligence (AI), and voice to communicate with their customers the way they want to communicate and via the channel of their choice.
“Almost every interaction between businesses and customers today involves a screen, yet the main method of getting in touch is still an old-school phone call,” Michaeli explains. “Over the next 3-5 years, the move from phone-first to digital-first communication will define the businesses that win customer experience in their category.”
With Glia, a customer service conversation can begin on a smartphone, transition seamlessly to co-browsing, and then move on to conversational AI with an intelligent agent or live chat with a human representative. And while the technology has strong application for sales teams (hence the company’s original name, SaleMove), the evolution of the technology has led to an evolution in the way the technology can be deployed.
“As we’ve built on (our) initial vision, our customers have found many ingenious uses for our functionality that we didn’t imagine at the time,” Michaeli says. “We realise now that the platform does so much more than move sales, so we’ve made the decision to build a brand which supports that wider vision of the value our customers are achieving.”
