While customer conversations are an important element of overall sales and marketing engagement today, most of these “conversations” are simply one-way messaging; texts from a company to a customer list, for example, or mass emails that haven’t changed much since 1999. These one-way efforts tend to produce shallow engagement and read rates.
Increasingly, companies are looking for more personalized two-way conversations to communicate with customers to boost sales and engagement. Artificial intelligence has been a massive benefit to these companies, given how virtual agents have gotten smarter, friendlier and more human-like.
In that vein, conversational commerce company Connectly recently announced $20 million in Series B investment led by Alibaba, with participation from Unusual Ventures, Volpe Capital, RX Ventures, Falabella Ventures and Philippos Kourkoulos Latsis. Connectly, a startup founded by industry veterans from Facebook, Google, Uber and McKinsey, uses proprietary AI models to help retailers grow their business using personalized two-way customer messages.
In its announcement, Connectly noted that its code-free platform is fast to onboard and deploy, allowing businesses to quickly create interactive campaigns at scale and use AI to automate two-way conversations with both established customers as well as prospective leads. The goal of the solution is to provide organizations with tangible results that include increased conversions, more engaged customers and improved customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Additionally, the funding announcement follows the company’s Series A investment in October 2023, which marked its entrance into the U.S. market. Also last year, the company launched Sofia AI, an advanced AI recommendation assistant, and nearly doubled its revenue as well as headcount over the past year.
"Now more than ever, customers are looking for personalized interactions with retail and e-commerce brands," said Stefanos Loukakos, co-founder and CEO of Connectly. "At Connectly, we are vigorously working to bring AI-powered conversational commerce to brands around the world to create more personalized interactions at scale. We have already accomplished so much in the past year, including launching a new AI Search for businesses and Sofia AI.”
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Edited by
Alex Passett
