In the U.S. it’s common for companies that have both physical branches and online services to use customer relationship management (CRM) software that tracks all of their interactions with customers in one place. In LatAm that isn’t the case, though, as many enterprises and banks keep the data from physical locations siloed from its digital counterpart. Numia wants to change that.
Argentina-based Numia’s tech helps companies integrate their customer service channels into one platform using AI. The platform is vendor agnostic and can connect to bank kiosks, tablets, and even software like Salesforce and Genesys. Companies looking to use Numia can pick and choose which integrations they want to connect. The company works with large enterprises across categories including banks, healthcare, and insurance, among others.
Numia co-founder and CEO Gustavo Lauria (pictured above, center) told TechCrunch that the company was originally founded in 2014 as a queue management software to help companies like banks and pharmacies manage their physical offices. The company decided to pivot to its current strategy in 2020 after seeing that customers weren’t connecting the data they got from their physical locations to their online platforms.
“There was a lot to do in the offline, and the offline was, and still is, a very overlooked area,” Lauria said. “[Numia] is essentially a customer journey manager that basically combines these two worlds, the physical and the digital, to seamlessly integrate it and be able to manage different customer journeys.”
Lauria said that bringing all of this data into one place creates more efficient customer interactions. It makes it easier for companies to connect their customers to human customer service reps if it makes sense to take an interaction offline. And some tasks that would have been completed by a human representative in a physical branch can now be taken care of by AI agents.
“We give sort of superpower to the CRM, because we had the CRM reach further in a way,” Lauria said. “So we had them reach further in the offline, and we had them connect also in the online. Of course, in the online, there’s more tools; what we offer them is the possibility of having it all integrated.”
The company now has more than 350 customers across 10 LatAm countries including big enterprises like Santander Bank, HSBC, and Allianz, among others.
Numia is profitable and on track to end the year with between $4.7 million and $5 million in booked ARR, Lauria said. He added that the company is looking to double that in the next two years. The company has avoided taking on venture financing in its 10-year history until now.
Numia is announcing a $3.5 million seed round led by Cometa with participation from MatterScale Ventures and London-based Boost Capital Partners, among others.
Lauria said that the company decided to raise outside capital so that it could get closer to its potential customers — many of which are LPs in the venture funds Numia was looking to raise from. It also allowed them to get the resources they needed to expand their customer base.
“In order for us to have all these resources, being at all the conferences we want, the amount of account executives, we need to be talking to these bank VPs all the time, and that takes a lot of resources,” Lauria said. “Raising capital was the decision that made the most sense for us.”
The fundraising journey didn’t start off easy, Lauria said, as he found that many investors didn’t get why the 10-year-old profitable company was raising capital to begin with. Once Cometa agreed to lead the round, though, it started to get easier, he said.
The company plans to put 70% of the capital toward marketing, sales, and hiring, Lauria said, and the other 30% will go toward improving and building out the tech. The company wants to keep expanding its capabilities to give customers more integration options. It’s also looking into improving the AI tech to create more efficiencies in the customer journey.
“Companies sell more by providing more personalized customer journeys,” Lauria said. “It’s not just how I make you more; I help you be more efficient. I make you sell more by personalizing more of the journey.”
