Neuron7 plans to use the new funding to grow its product and customer success teams in the US and India. Both teams will enable Neuron7 to continue bringing innovative solutions to the market that help customers as they move to outcome-as-a-service and predictive service business models. 

Customer and field service organizations are significantly impacted by the following three industry trends: 

1. An unprecedented skills shortage due to a tsunami of baby boomers retiring, creating huge losses of “tribal knowledge” of products and customers. 
2. Products such as high-tech electronics, medical devices, and industrial manufacturing equipment are growing more complex and harder to support, every day. 
3. Customers increasingly demand instant answers, often via self-service portals and chatbots. 

These challenges are growing more acute with the economic downturn looming, and service operational excellence and profitability will be even more in focus. 

Neuron7 leverages AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to help service organizations overcome these challenges and greatly improve service metrics like first-time fix, tribal knowledge capture, faster turnaround times, call deflections, and customer satisfaction.

The Neuron7 Service Intelligence Platform is a cloud-based service that extracts intelligence from the two biggest sources of knowledge in an enterprise – its data and its people.

This “Collective Intelligence” is turned into actionable predictions that help people diagnose and resolve any issue in seconds, no matter how complex the issue, and no matter how experienced the service person is.

“Knowledge in an enterprise is siloed. Support, field service, and engineering expertise are spread across systems, data and experts” said Niken Patel, CEO of Neuron7.ai. “Re-thinking the way knowledge/intelligence is captured and shared across silos in the enterprise, Neuron7.ai creates an enterprise-wide Resolution system of record.”

Since its launch last year, Neuron7 has been deployed by Keysight Technologies, Xilinx, Parkview Healthcare, Softtek, and other leading companies.

Neuron7 has also introduced several groundbreaking new AI-powered service intelligence capabilities:

• Intelligent Search – understands the human context of questions to find the exact answer from within a company’s entire body of customer service data & documents
• Intelligent Diagnostics Micro predictions at each step of the diagnostic process lead technicians to success for every issue across every product model. Capture ”how” technicians diagnose and solve each issue 
• Intelligent Telemetry converts data sent by connected devices into actionable insights & preemptive maintenance recommendations.

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Distinct Horizon an agritech company benefiting the farmers with a widely tested Urea Deep Placement technique to reduce chemical usage for productive farming. It develops advanced technologies to boost farmer’s marginal profit and increase their food production while protecting the environment. It aims at technological equipment of farmers by providing innovative machines. With a joint approach, Distinct Horizon and Ayekart will also support in farmer training as well as exploring new markets.

Simplifying the primary objective of this MOU, Mr. Debarshi Dutta, Co-founder & CEO, Ayekart said, “We at Ayekart believe in technological advancement of agricultural produce through digitizing farmer’s productivity with various advance machines and introducing partnership opportunities with distributors, wholesalers, stakeholders, etc. It is one of our key mottos to digitize the food and agri value chain of India. To benefit farmer communities, we are also trying to procure funding through CSR, NGO’s and government bodies to help boost their productivity and enhance their business.”

Government bodies like NABARD has created the Farm Sector Promotion Fund to incubate innovations and diffusion of technologies in the realm of agriculture and allied sectors to benefit vulnerable sectors of farmers. These funding from government, CSR, NGO’s will help benefiting the farmer. Various partnership opportunities and advancement in technology helps boosting productivity and income of the famer communities of India.

Adding to Mr. Dutta’s statement, Santosh Kumar, Co-Founder & Head Operations, Distinct Horizon, said, “Our technologies can revolutionize the agriculture sector both in terms of productivity and income increase while at the same time significantly reduce chemical input and costs of production towards massive climate change mitigation and a healthier soil. It is our pleasure to work alongside an entity like Ayekart which is committed to scale up such technologies.”

Advancement in machinery have expanded the scale, speed, and productivity of farm equipment, leading to more efficient cultivation of more land. These advanced devices and precision agriculture allow farmer’s businesses to be more profitable, efficient, safer, and more environmentally friendly. Ayekart will create an end-to-end solution by digitizing, handholding and providing funding to these farmer communities.

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CMS IT Services, the leading digital transformation partner of enterprises globally, has released a new framework for Identity and Access Management – the number one problem plaguing CISOs in the remote-working digital economy.

“With a staggering 4000 cyber-attacks carried out daily, cybercrime surged by 800 per cent during the pandemic. Social engineering is a prime threat, with hackers employing AI-assisted tools to steal user identities and perpetrate supply chain attacks and enterprise-wide fraud. Our 5A framework helps businesses stay ahead of disruption by heightening identity governance for all entities in the system – be it in-house employees, partners, or third-party integrations – while also preserving the user experience”, explains Anuj Vaid, Executive Director, CMS IT Services.

In modern enterprises, a hybrid IT architecture – along with a complex web of distributed users, devices, and applications – amplifies the access points to data and system vulnerabilities. With the volume, velocity, and variety of operational data generated every minute, it’s impossible to scale a piece-meal approach to control who has access to what, where and how.

The 5A framework utilizes the principles of Ikigai to ensure that all the layers and dimensions of functions that are fulfilled in an enterprise by different people, at different places come together in a reliable and secure way. This holistic approach is the foundation of a comprehensive suite of scalable security solutions that span the whole expanse of areas and entities in a contemporary business.

“The best part is that the 5As of IAM approach doesn’t require you to re-engineer your cybersecurity strategy. Instead, it helps you maximize the power of your existing security investments and fortify your enterprise-wide defenses without having to make new capex investments”, added SudhansuNayak, HeadCybersecurity, CMS IT Services.

A whitepaper on how to leverage the 5A methodology for enterprise-wide Identity and Access Management is available here. https://bit.ly/3jJ9crk

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Zendesk, Inc. announced the launch of Explore Enterprise, the newest solution within its service-first CRM platform, which enables companies to analyze real-time data in order to understand changing needs.

Leaders can use Explore Enterprise to share relevant insights instantly with other teams and departments as global ticket volume reaches record highs, helping them make faster decisions to improve their entire customer experience.

KT Prasad, MD and RVP Sales, India & SAARC at Zendesk said, “Over the past few months, companies in India have been striving to adapt to the changing needs and demands of their customers as the pandemic continues to unfold and new trends emerge. Our Benchmark Snapshot Report indicates that even though service requests may finally be stabilizing after months of volatility, higher volumes may continue to persist, at least for a foreseeable future. Therefore, having timely insights are even more crucial for businesses to spot gaps in their customer service and quickly implement modifications that people expect.”

He added, “With the ability to stay a step ahead of their customers and proactively improve their overall customer experience journey, Explore Enterprise will help many businesses in India not just survive but thrive in today’s landscape.”

“Customers are seeking more support from businesses than ever before, which is putting increased pressure on CX leaders and their teams,” said Shawna Wolverton, EVP of Product, Zendesk. She added “With Explore Enterprise, Zendesk gives companies the ability to analyze data in order to have a clear view of customer trends they are seeing across our Support and Sales Suites. These comprehensive insights allow businesses to quickly address emerging challenges and opportunities not just in customer service, but throughout their entire business.”

With real-time analytics and enhanced team collaboration features, Explore Enterprise enables leaders to manage and scale their business by:

• Monitoring data across customer support channels with pre-built and customizable live charts
• Acting on current trends by setting threshold alerts to see when teams are under a heavy load
• Improving productivity and reducing context switching with embeddable dashboards
• Boosting team collaboration with advanced report sharing and scheduling capabilities inside and outside the organization

Zendesk customers such as Mailchimp are already benefiting from using Explore’s reporting analytics to understand trends in over 30,000 tickets a month.

“It’s about understanding our data as a whole, and being able to look at the big picture, We’re able to take that cumulative voice of the customer and distill that down to figure out what needs to be prioritized and make meaningful fixes that happen,” said Spencer Caratti, Senior Director of Customer Support at Mailchimp.

Sheryl Kingstone of 451 Research said that “There is still a massive global shift towards digital transformation, and that has recently accelerated across every industry sector. Businesses must respond to this new pace of change and the organizations that are already digitally-driven will pivot faster.”

Explore Enterprise provides instant insight across Zendesk products including Support, Talk, Chat, Sell, and Guide to provide a comprehensive, unified view of the customer. This includes information on how customers are using social messaging for support and which channels they prefer for communication.

These learnings enable leaders to refine how they serve customers over channels such as Apple Business Chat, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Twitter Direct Messages, WeChat, and LINE.

In addition, teams will be able to bring in data from external third-party systems through integrations with Zendesk’s open and flexible CRM platform, Sunshine, for a holistic picture of their business.

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California-headquartered ZineOne, a provider of new-age customer engagement solutions for enterprises, has raised $2.5 million in a Series A round led by Omidyar Network, the Silicon Valley-based impact investing firm established by Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay.

Other investors include Harvard Business School Alumni Angels, Touchstone Equities, as well as existing investors Hyderabad Angels and Golden Seeds.

This round brings ZineOne’s total venture capital received to date to $5 million.

The company intends to use the newly-raised funds to aggressively accelerate sales, marketing, and execution of a product roadmap that is focused on building the most intelligent system within this category, with significant investments toward securing top talent in machine learning and artificial intelligence.

ZineOne is a next generation customer engagement hub that uses machine learning algorithms to provide banks and retailers with the ability to engage with their customers real-time, in a contextual and personalised manner. The platform helps enterprises connect the dots between their different customer data streams and also create actionable insights that can be used while customers are interacting with their brand in real time—such as in a branch or store, at their e-commerce website or mobile app.

“More and more enterprises around the world are recognising the need to move their customer engagement efforts beyond e-mails and call centres into an immediate, contextual, and real-time world,” said Debjani Deb, ZineOne CEO. “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.“

The emerging category of customer engagement hubs is expected to disrupt an estimated $10 billion 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.

ZineOne is a player in the emerging segment of next generation customer engagement hubs, which bring together event-driven, streaming technologies to power real-time personalisation.

ZineOne claims it currently enables more than 100 million users, processing over five billion events a year, and generating 100 gigabyte of data every hour worldwide. In the US, the company works with one of the top five retailers in the country, connecting all its digital and physical channels and delivering three to five times more sales conversions through highly personalised, contextual messaging with customers through various touch points.

In India, ZineOne is enabling financial institutions to provide a better digital experience to their customers by using personalised context to nudge consumers to better financial behaviours, such as increasing savings. On average, it has helped client-banks increase transaction completion rates up to 20 per cent.

HDFC Bank, India’s largest private bank, is leveraging ZineOne’s value proposition across all its digital channels and experiencing significant gains in customer engagement, including three times the click through rate than with traditional methods.

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CustomerSuccessBox, an online platform which applies Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to automate customer on-boarding, product usage analysis and user communication in B2B SaaS companies, has raised $1 million in pre-Series A funding, led by pi Ventures with participation from Axilor Ventures.

The funding will be used to drive growth and product innovation.

CustomerSuccessBox is a customer success platform, which applies Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to automate customer onboarding, product usage analysis and user communication. Thus, enabling success managers to deliver a superior customer onboarding experience, retain customers, drive, upsell and improve Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) and Life-time Value (LTV) for SaaS businesses.

CustomerSuccessBox was founded in 2016 by Puneet Kataria (Founder & CEO) and Amritpal Singh (Co-founder & CTO). The platform is being used by success managers at global B2B software companies including XebiaLabs, WizIQ, Synup and WoowUp. Its patent pending technology has processed over 30 million data points from over 100,000 end users to calculate Account Health Scores.

Kataria said: “B2B SaaS businesses bleed, churn and struggle with customer retention. Customer churn is the biggest blocker of growth, it’s like trying fill up a leaky bucket. B2B SaaS and subscription businesses cannot continue to operate with the old ‘reactive’ support model. CustomerSuccessBox was built from a clear need for a solution which could deliver ‘proactive’ customer success.”

Abishek Surendran, Partner, pi Ventures, added: “The focus of SaaS companies has shifted from customer acquisition to reducing churn. The founding team’s extensive understanding of the customer success space has helped build a world class product which we have no doubt can help SaaS companies retain customers. The product is a natural fit for AI and ML to automatically calculate customer health.”

pi Ventures is India’s first Applied Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning & IoT focused early stage venture fund, founded by Manish Singhal (Ex Co-founder & CEO, LetsVenture and prominent angel investor) and UmakantSoni (Ex Director India, Science Inc & Co-founder AI BOT company). pi Ventures focuses on healthcare, logistics, retail, fintech and enterprise sectors and has so far invested in Zenatix (data-driven energy efficiency), SigTuple (revolutionising global healthcare space through data driven intelligence), NIRAMAI (non-invasive, non-touch, non-radiation approach to detect breast cancer) and ten3T (medical grade wearable device).

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Bangalore-based SmartQ, which provides digitisation services for food courts and cafeterias, today announced that it has raised close to $1 million from an investor group, led by a consortium of Dubai-based investors.

Existing investor YourNest also participated in this round.

The foodtech startup intends to use the funds to expand in India and globally, strengthen the team. It also plans to roll out new products.

Additionally, Anvita Varshney, former Managing Director of Lazada group, has joined as the Board of Advisors for SmartQ.

Founded in 2014 by Krishna Wage and Abhishek Ashok, SmartQ provides integrated digital cafeteria experience across different sectors, including corporates, malls, multiplexes, stadiums, hospitals and colleges. It transforms any conventional cafeteria into one that is completely digital and cashless.

By offering completely customised 360-degree digital cafeteria solutions with multiple ordering channels like mobile application and automated billing kiosks, SmartQ helps in improving consumers’ experience while saving their time and cost.

SmartQ claims it has been growing 50 per cent month-on-month and clocks over 1,00,000+ transactions every day.

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Bangalore- and Singapore-based startup Vahan Inc., which has developed a virtual assistant for businesses in India and Southeast Asia, has secured an undisclosed sum in seed funding from a slew of investors, including Indonesia’s RMKB Ventures and Silicon Valley-based Spike Ventures.

Gokul Rajaram (Product Lead at Square and formerly with Google), Sanjeev Agarwal (former Head of Marketing at Google), Mekin Maheshwari (former CPO of Flipkart, and Vir Kashyap (Co-founder at Babajob) and several other Googlers from Silicon Valley also co-invested in this round.

Vahan will use the money to scale its total user base to a million users, mature its Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language technology. It also plans to expand its sales and engineering teams, particularly in Machine Learning.

The fundraise was first reported by e27.

Vahan was co-founded in 2016 by Mohammed Abdoolcarim, a former employee of Google and Siri, and Madhav Krishna, a Machine Learning and AI expert. It has developed a virtual assistant on WhatsApp for blue-collar workers (drivers, delivery boys, bank tellers and baristas). They can chat with the assistant without having to download a separate app. The virtual assistant is customisable to align to employers’ support, training, communication and reporting needs.

“Businesses globally are already using messaging apps to engage their workers, but find it difficult to scale and save costs. Our assistant uses Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning techniques to automate tasks such as acquisition/on-boarding, training and support, and helps companies engage their workers at scale,” Abdoolcarim said.

Currently, Vahan supports English, Hinglish (Hindi written in English), and plans to add more languages including Bahasa.

Vahan is catering mainly to large enterprises in India, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Middle East. It is currently working with Uber, Careem, Grab, Dunzo, Unnati, Amazon, YES Bank, and Flipkart.

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Bangalore-based startups Neewee and EFLIGHT have signed contracts with global aircraft company Airbus and its subsidiary NAVBLUE to bring to life their innovative ideas in aerospace that are in line with the Indian government’s ‘Make in India’ and ‘Startup India’ initiatives.

The two startups were part of five startups chosen a year back from the second season of the Airbus Bizlab technology acceleration programme that attracted 137 applications from nine countries.

Neewee’s solution, called procuSense, will enhance certainty to manufacturing supply chain and procurement operations at Airbus, using advanced analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

EFLIGHT’s trip support solution will offer a suite of services that allows business jet pilots to optimise plans for fuel, time, route and weather. The startup has also signed an exclusive partnership with an Airbus subsidiary to jointly address some opportunities in India.

Siddharth Balachandran, Airbus BizLab Leader – India, said, “Both Neewee and EFLIGHT are unique solutions that have the potential to provide significant and long-term benefits to not only Airbus but other big and small businesses on a global scale. The roadmap for the future includes implementing Neewee’s analytics solution in other Airbus functions globally.”

Bizlab is a part of Airbus’ innovative strategy to bring together startups and Airbus “intrapreneurs” to work and speed up the transformation of their innovative ideas into valuable businesses. Through its six-month “acceleration programme”, Airbus Bizlab gives access to a large number of coaches, experts and mentors in various domains that help start-ups and internal projects speed-up the transformation of their ideas into valuable businesses.

EFLIGHT is a trip support company that has been created to simplify and automate the entire flight planning process. Founded in 2015, EFLIGHT serves more than 40 business aviation clients in India and handles on an average of 150 flights a day.

Neewee is an analytics services company focused on manufacturing industry, specifically in the supply chain area. Its supply chain solution, procuSense, helps bring certainty to Manufacturing Supply Chains and Procurement operations using Advanced Analytics, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence.

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