Kustomer Raises $35 Million Series C Led by Battery Ventures, Further Challenging Salesforce and Zendesk as it Expands Into the Enterprise Market

By STS News Desk On Jan 25, 2019

Kustomer Adds Instagram Messaging Integration to Fuel Social Commerce and Customer Service

Adds Neeraj Agrawal, General Partner at Battery Ventures, to Board of Directors

Kustomer, the next-generation customer management platform for the people-first enterprise, announced a $35 million Series C round led by Battery Ventures, bringing Kustomer’s total funding to $73.5 million. The investment comes just 6 months after its Series B round in June of 2018. Kustomer plans to use the capital to accelerate its go-to-market strategy, expand internationally, and invest in its platform, launching new products while cementing its position as the next-generation alternative to legacy solutions like Salesforce, Oracle and Zendesk.

Neeraj Agrawal, a general partner at Battery Ventures and a seasoned B2B software investor, joins Kustomer’s Board of Directors. Battery Ventures joins current investors Redpoint Ventures, Canaan Partners, Boldstart Ventures, Social Leverage and Cisco Investments who also participated in the round.

“From early on, leading brands in the B2C and DTC segments were attracted to Kustomer because we provide a next-generation alternative to outdated technologies and a solution to an endless queue of tickets that’s weighing companies down and frustrating their agents and customers,” said Brad Birnbaum, CEO of Kustomer. “Kustomer’s first-of-its-kind data model and one, single timeline view of customer interactions and events have differentiated us from legacy solutions and are the basis for our 500% year-over-year growth.”

Kustomer’s explosive growth has been driven by its ability to attract large companies with thousands of service agents, rising frustration from existing outdated solutions that fail to deliver on their customer experience promise, the need for business process automation to drive efficiencies, and an overall shift in approach to customer management.

“We’ve been closely following Kustomer’s impressive growth and see a large opportunity for the company to become one of the top players in this market—owing mainly to its powerful platform, experienced team and ability to execute on its vision,” said Battery’s Agrawal. “We’re excited to leverage Battery’s global network and company-scaling expertise to partner with Brad and the rest of the Kustomer team to help the company expand further into the enterprise market.”

NYC-based Kustomer is one of the fastest-growing startups in its space. The company’s growth momentum is demonstrated by the expanding list of disruptive and innovative brands – like Ring, Rent the Runway, Glovo, Glossier, Away, Slice, Sweetgreen and UNTUCKit – using Kustomer to deliver on their people-first promise everyday.

“Since switching to Kustomer from Desk.com, we’ve seen a 30-second decrease in handle time for voice interactions, a 25% overall improvement in efficiency and productivity from our team members, and a significant improvement in our FCR rate,” commented Mike Vroom, Customer Service Director at the click and brick retailer UNTUCKit. “I knew we were going to be more efficient with Kustomer, but I didn’t know HOW much more efficient. The ease of use has been really flawless, and everything our team members need is finally all in one place.”

“Kustomer has completely transformed our customer support operation here at Glovo.” Remarks Sergi Mendez, Global Head of Live Operations Support. “We are a three-sided marketplace, meaning our 2,000 agents provide support for our Glovers, merchants, and consumers. Through powerful workflows and simple integrations, our agents are able to handle over 1.8 million conversations per month across multiple channels without switching interfaces/platforms. Since switching to Kustomer, we have increased efficiency and are constantly improving live support to our users in over 20 countries across the globe.”

To keep up with growing demand, Kustomer has doubled the size of it’s workforce in 2018 and is planning on more than doubling it again in 2019. Today it is also announcing key senior leadership appointments, bolstering its leadership team capabilities as it takes on giant industry leaders and continues its growth momentum: Amir Oren as VP of Finance (Formerly of Talkdesk, Zendesk and Dropbox), Nelly Rinot as VP of Marketing (Formerly of NICE, RRD and Radware), Alex Gadd as VP of Customer Experience (Formerly of SugarCRM and Oracle), and the promotion of Vikas Bhambri to SVP, Global Sales and Customer Experience (Formerly of Oracle, LivePerson and 8×8).

“We are fortunate to have incredible depth and breadth of talent across Kustomer’s executive team,” said Birnbaum. “As we start executing on our strategy, I strongly believe the new appointments will help us tightly integrate all functions of the company and will help pave the way to our continued success in revolutionizing the customer management, service and support space in 2019 and beyond.”