EvaBot’s chatbot gathers information to help businesses personalize gifts that are actually meaningful and enjoyable to recipients, resulting in deeper and more engaging relationships
EvaBot, the emotionally intelligent relationship solution that helps companies build and accelerate customer and employee relationships, announced it has raised $8.33 million in Series A and $2.5 million debt financing, led by Comcast Ventures, with participation from Alumni Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, Precursor Ventures, Forefront Venture Partners, and Silicon Valley Bank. The company had previously raised $3 million in pre-seed and seed funding.
The concept of corporate gifting to maintain healthy client relationships certainly isn’t a novel concept, but to date it has almost always meant simply exchanging company-branded swag. The biggest players in the market are little more than “gifting platforms” that still require the sender to know what they want to send and don’t have any degree of deep personalization that makes the recipient feel valued, nor the actionable intelligence that allows the sender to make better business decisions. Not to mention, those enterprise solutions are often expensive.
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When EvaBot co-founders Rabi Gupta, Satwick Saxena, Ashish Kumar, and Akshay Gupta immigrated to the US in 2016, they realized how hard it was to build genuine, meaningful relationships if you do not already have some kind of foothold, community or network to rely on. So, they started to think about gifting as a means to accelerate the development of professional relationships. Stemming from research that proved that humans share more information while chatting with a bot than other humans, they had the idea to develop a bot that could gather information quickly to better understand what people like so they could create a more personal, deeper connection.
Enter EvaBot. Once a sender shares a universal, dynamic link via email or text, the recipient can start answering a few engaging questions about their likes, preferences, or lifestyle. After about 3-4 minutes, EvaBot can select and send the perfect personalized surprise gift tailored to the recipient’s tastes, packaged in a company’s own branded box along with a handwritten note. EvaBot is 100 percent opt-in and does not require any downloads for the recipient.
“Relationship building is all about being thoughtful and showing the other person you care about them and understand the kinds of things that make them happy,” said Gupta, CEO of EvaBot. “Nobody really appreciates getting branded swag from another company anymore. We want to help teams find interesting products that their clients will appreciate and actually value, but the gift itself is not the end game. It’s about creating a deeper, more engaging customer and employee experience that carries value beyond the initial interaction.”
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EvaBot is used by teams across multiple industries including real estate, customer engagement, employee engagement, sales, and marketing. One of its more notable customers is Cigna, a global health services company, offering insurance and Medicare plans to individuals, families, and businesses.
“I selected EvaBot for several batches of gifts for our external partners. I was looking for something unique, and Eva definitely delivered! I’m very happy with my experience and look forward to using Eva in the future. I appreciate the quick and personalized customer service, and like having the option to customize gifts. Thank you, Eva, for the seamless experience,” said Cecilia Hughes, Executive Director of Sales, Cigna Pacific Northwest.
“It’s clear that corporate administrative tasks are unbundling, for example calendaring. Similarly, we believe that automated, personalized solutions will emerge in the gifting space; but, the opportunity around gifting is so much larger because as a social gesture it goes right to the heart of client sales and employee retention. In a world of increasingly remote work, gifting will become an important tool for companies to build and sustain relationships with clients and employees that they don’t often see face to face. Eva is the only company that has built a technology that actually replicates personal gifting, where real consideration and care has been taken to choose a gift that suits the receiver and yet is still a surprise,” said Cleland, who joins the board of EvaBot.
EvaBot has shipped more than 125,000 unique, personalized gifts to date with 90 percent customer satisfaction. The team is headquartered in San Francisco with staff based in Dallas, Texas, as well as Canada, and India.
