Customer Engagement Company ZineOne Raises $2.5 Mn Funding From Omidyar Network

Silicon Valley-headquartered customer engagement company ZineOne has raised $2.5 Mn in Series A round of funding led by Omidyar Network. The company currently has an office in India.

Others who participated in the funding round include Harvard Business School Alumni Angels, Touchstone Equities, as well as existing investors Hyderabad Angels and Golden Seeds.

It plans to use the funds towards aggressively accelerating sales, marketing and the execution of a product roadmap that is focussed on building the most intelligent system within its category, with significant investments toward securing top talent in machine learning and artificial intelligence.

As part of the fundraise, Omidyar Network’s Venture Partner Ken Miller has joined ZineOne’s board.

Commenting on the funding, Debjani Deb, CEO, ZineOne said, “More and more enterprises around the world are recognising the need to move their customer engagement efforts beyond emails and call centres into an immediate, contextual and real-time world. The year 2018 presents an inflection point in the industry and with this new funding, ZineOne is well positioned to lead the market in this emerging segment.”

With this Series A round of funding, ZineOne’s total fundraise has reached $5 Mn. Earlier in June 2017, the company raised $2.5 Mn from New York-based Golden Seeds Angels, India-based Hyderabad Angels and other prominent investors.

Commenting on the development, Ken Miller said, “We are excited to see how artificial intelligence, machine learning and other new technologies are coming together to personalise and enhance the consumer experience. ZineOne delivers on this promise and benefits banks and retailers who are looking to better serve their clients, but most importantly consumers, who now have products and services tailored to meet their unique needs and delivered when they need them.”

Founded in 2014 by Debjani Deb, Manish Malhotra and Arnab Mukherjee, ZineOne uses  machine learning algorithms to provide banks and retailers with the ability to engage with their customers real-time, in a highly contextual and personalised manner.

On its website, the company mentions that its “mission is to help traditional brick-and-mortar enterprises re-imagine customer engagement in a new, real-time, high-touch, digital world.”

It also claims that, at present, ZineOne enables more than 100 Mn users, processing over 5 Bn events a year, and generating 100 GB of data every hour worldwide.

In India, ZineOne is enabling financial institutions to provide a seamless digital experience to their customers by using personalised context to nudge consumers to better financial behaviours, such as increasing savings.

The company also claimed that one of its customers is HDFC Bank, which is leveraging ZineOne’s value proposition across all its digital channels and experiencing significant gains in customer engagement, including a growth in the click-through rate that is three times greater than with traditional methods.

In the customer engagement hub segment, ZineOne competes with the likes of Servion, Dimension Data, etc. In its statement, the company claimed that the customer engagement hubs are expected to disrupt an estimated $10 Bn currently spent on marketing automation and customer experience software worldwide, by moving the industry away from batch emails, push messaging and call centres, to “in the moment” interactions.

Amid the growing technology and very few companies currently in the sector, the latest funding from Omidyar Network is bound to help ZineOne expand its services and get a stronghold in the market.