Customer interactions with speed and empathy–announcing Zowie’s $5M seed funding

Today, we’re thrilled to announce our $5M seed funding from top investors, including Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI-focused fund) and 10x from Germany, plus returning investors Inovo Venture Partners and angel investors like Jack Altman (CEO at Lattice), and Markus Giesswein (CEO at Giesswein). This investment will help us expand our product offering and grow our team.

When you walk into your favorite local shop, the staff remember your name and the things you like–for example, the brand of shoes that fit you best. You can explore what’s new, and if you have a question or problem, it’s solved immediately.

As online shopping has grown, this sense of atmosphere and connection has gotten lost. But it doesn’t have to be like this.

At Zowie, our goal is to help digital retailers create personalized shopping experiences that build relationships and increase sales. For us, this is what modern, online customer interactions should be.

We’re building a one-stop suite of tools for digital retailers to help them achieve this–all powered by our industry-leading machine-learning technology, X1.

We start by automating repetitive questions like “does this come in my size?” Customers quickly get the answers they need and customer service agents have more time to handle complex customer requests with a human touch. This builds relationships and allows customer support to generate revenue.

We call this cycle: Deflect, Care, Sell.

To put this in context: take our client, Giesswein. Their retail footwear and apparel business had fantastic results offline, and they looked to Zowie to enable their new ecommerce strategy.

Zowie’s positive impact was near-instantaneous.

Zowie transformed day-to-day work for Giesswein’s CS team and ecommerce business, supporting 45% revenue growth. Now, Markus Giesswein is supporting Zowie’s growth–he participated as an angel investor in this round of funding. 

We deliver excellence that makes clients like Markus love Zowie. Our Net Promoter Score (NPS) is 92, which we're seriously proud of.

And in a short time, we've firmly proven our success as a business: our revenue grew by 3x last year.

Zowie is laying the foundation for a grander vision–to enable online shop owners to understand their customers, offer superior help, build relationships, and, ultimately, generate higher profits.

We’re ramping up our product development in key areas to achieve these goals.

As we push forward, our priorities for our customers are:

1. Allow you to automate more of your repetitive work. The potential for automation goes far beyond messages and chats. We’re expanding our channels so that our customers can expand, too.

2. Make it easier and faster for you to work with Zowie. Our industry-leading AI technology is already category defining. It currently takes a few hours to be up and running with Zowie–we want it to take seconds.

3. Help you increase your sales. At the end of the day, we want to help companies grow. We’re adding more tools and features to enable this.

A grand vision like ours needs the right people to make it a reality.

After doubling the size of our team last year, we plan to do the same this year and grow to 80 employees–and beyond.

There’s no limit on where we can take this. We’ve come such a long way from our beginnings as a conversational AI solution. Speaking for all of us at Zowie, we’re really proud of the hard work and dedication that brought us here–and even more excited than ever about the future of Zowie.

Maja Schaefer, CEO