Soapbox.ai, the Australian start-up provider of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) service automation platform that combines predictive search, natural language understanding and machine learning for service management, has raised $550,000 in an initial funding round.
Up until now, Soapbox.ai has been self-funded enabling the company to develop the product and conduct early market testing. The new funding will enable the company to focus on expanding its development team, while also allowing Soapbox.ai to start scaling sales activities. At the same time, the company will open an office in Dublin, Ireland and recruitment local management to service both the Ireland and UK markets.
Soapbox.ai’s AI-driven system accelerates the next generation of intelligent service management enabling organisations to scale service capacity, maintain service quality and deliver service consistency.
What does this funding mean for Soapbox.ai?
“This funding round is our first as we start to accelerate product development and focus on customer acquisition,” says Dion Williams, CEO, Soapbox.ai “Our investors are high net worth individuals who have extensive experience and understanding of the service management market. At the same time, they believe in the vision and the opportunity which Soapbox presents.
“Right now, we’re engaged in discussions with a number of customers who see the value of our vision and would like to work with us as we disrupt what has largely been a slow start in the AI domain, by making work better, faster, simpler,” says Williams.
John Gilleran, a service management industry veteran with more than 20 years of global sales and marketing experience, has been appointed to head up the new Ireland office with a specific focus on delivering and scaling new SaaS platforms into the UK and Ireland markets.
Gilleran’s most recent success was at Focus Group Europe which he founded in 2009 and later sold to Accenture in 2017. His ambitious double-digit growth goals were set and surpassed for seven successful years in a row. In 2016, Focus Group Europe was included in The Sunday Times newspaper’s prestigious Fast Track listing as the 33rd fastest growing privately owned IT business in the United Kingdom.
“We feel the combination of the product and market fit combined with a seasoned veteran like John provides us the opportunity to gain early traction in a key international market,” says Williams.
Many organisations still employ outdated forms-based systems to manage work which are almost entirely reliant on human attention to progress and resolve. By pairing self-learning AI with human agents, Soapbox.ai can vastly increase productivity by observing, learning, augmenting and automating work to support automatic resolution for customers.
According to IDC “The worldwide IT service management software market achieved a level of $4.69 billion in 2017, according to IDC estimates. The market as a whole is forecast to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 8.1% during the 2017–2022 period with the public cloud–based segment growing at a higher double-digit rate.”
Soapbox.ai is currently engaged with a number of beta customers both locally and internationally and expects general availability of the Soapbox platform in January 2019.
“While the current funding allows us to scale the team and focus on customer acquisition, we anticipate a larger raise later next year. This round will be used to help us scale the business including expansion into the North America market, which we believe we also be our largest market,” says Williams.
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