Kustomer Inc. has received $10 million in a Series A funding round that it will use to continue to develop and market its recently launched customer relationship management system.
The year-old New York-based company says its CRM technology, which it offers through a software-as-a-service, or SaaS model, is designed to help sales reps use multiple sources of information about their customers to interact with them on a personal basis. SaaS lets users access a vendor’s technology via a web browser instead of deploying it on their own infrastructure.
“Customer relationships are one of the most important assets a company has, but businesses are using outdated point solutions to manage them,” says Brad Birnbaum, CEO and co-founder. “We’re going to change that. We want to help agents and teams more effectively collaborate by utilizing a simple, yet powerful interface that provides a full understanding of their customers as real people.”
That CRM model has attracted the financial support of investment firms Canaan Partners, Boldstart Ventures, Social Leverage, BoxGroup and Plug and Play Ventures, which have provided the $10 million in funding. Combined with earlier seed funding of $2.5 million from several of those firms, the new funding brings Kustomer’s total to $12.5 million.
“The marriage of customer support and SaaS expertise in Kustomer’s executive team makes them uniquely capable of providing the much-needed disruption of customer service,” says Warren Lee, general partner at Canaan Partners. “Consumerization of the enterprise is something we’ve seen work well in cases like Slack, but Kustomer’s approach to this problem is really the first of its kind.”
Kustomer is providing its CRM technology for no charge through next March. It says it will announce in January the pricing that it will begin charging in April.
Birnbaum and Kustomer co-founder Jeremy Suriel, chief technology officer, also founded Assistly in 2009 as a provider of online customer service technology. They sold Assistly in 2011 to Salesforce.com Inc., which renamed it Desk.com.
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