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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