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In Funding Announcement, CRM & Customer Experience, Foundries

WeGift Raises $12M in Series A+ Funding

WeGift, a London, UK-based company providing the infrastructure for the incentives economy, closed a $12m funding round.

The round was led by AlbionVC with participation from new investor CommerzVentures, as well as Stride.VC, SAP.iO Fund, and Unilever Ventures.

The company intends to use the funds to continue to expand operations and its business reach.

Led by Founder and CEO Aron Alexander, WeGift provides a cloud-based platform and open API solution serving a broad set of needs for medium and enterprise businesses, including acquisition, retention, recognition, and reimbursements. Operating in more than 30 countries, and dozens of languages and currencies, the company’s digital payouts platform and open API solution is directly integrated into every brand on its platform, offering corporate buyers a global network with direct access to more than 700 brands. Habito, Perkbox, Seated, Sodexo, Vodafone, and Vouchercodes all use WeGift’s to digitally engage their audiences.

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In Fund, Article, CRM & Customer Experience

Automated speech recognition gives CX vendor an edge

Sharpen, a vendor of a cloud-based contact center platform, offers an automated transcription service as part of its software package. It’s free, which its customers like, but a few years ago, Sharpen was getting complaints from customers that its transcriptions weren’t accurate.

“The transcription wasn’t great,” said Adam Settle, Sharpen’s vice president of product, who declined to name the automated transcription software vendor that the company used.

The customer wanted to use the service for keyword spotting, he said. But, he added, “searching for a keyword is kind of pointless” if the transcription is wrong.

The complaint sparked Sharpen to search for a new automated transcription vendor. That search eventually led them to Deepgram, an automated speech recognition startup founded in 2015.

A new vendor

Sharpen first became acquainted with Deepgram a few years ago, after seeing it demonstrate its automated speech recognition platform at a conference.

The platform, built on deep learning models, can come pre-trained on Deepgram’s library of calls. Users can upload pre-labeled speech files or label speech as they go, to further train and customize the platform.

Users can run the platform in the cloud or on premises and can access the speech recognition models through APIs.

Sharpen tested the products of numerous startups and big-name tech vendors before choosing Deepgram. Each had its problems, however. Some platforms, like the one from their first vendor, didn’t provide accurate transcriptions. Others, including systems from Google and Amazon, were too expensive, Settle said.

Some platforms “were eight times the cost without being eight times the quality,” he said.

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In Article, Portfolio News, CRM & Customer Experience

Revuze and Gaprise Partner Bring Self-service CX to Brands in Japan

With increased demand to predict products success in the market and to understand markets needs and sentiment, Japan-based Brands can now have an opportunity to learn from their consumers and improve their Products competitive edge.

Revuze enables brands to quickly understand their product and customer satisfaction issues, and to automatically score and rank their brand’s performance relative to its competitors and to the market.

Revuze uses AI, powered by Natural-language programming (NLP) and machine learning, to empower Brands that previously have relied on manually intensive solutions, such as text analytics, social listening and monitoring with a simple online service. Without the need to pre-define a single keyword, rule, topic or sentiment value – Insight Analysts can access the most nuanced information available. The data is delivered, via a single screen, about consumers and their needs, across thousands of internal and external data sources, on any given product Category.

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