Artificial Intelligence Firm ASAPP Completes $185 Million in Series B Investment to Radically Improve the Productivity of Customer Experience Employees

ASAPP, Inc., the artificial intelligence research-driven company advancing the future of productivity and efficiency in customer experience, announced that it recently completed $185 million in Series B funding bringing the company’s total funding to $260 million. Participation in the Series B round includes legendary Silicon Valley veterans John DoerrJohn ChambersDave Strohm, and Joe Tucci, along with respected institutions Emergence Capital, March Capital Partners, Euclidean Capital, Telstra Ventures, HOF Capital and Vast Ventures.

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“ASAPP builds AI-Native products to solve problems of massive scale and systemic inefficiency. We are thrilled and grateful for this latest investment, which allows ASAPP to continue scaling and meeting the extraordinary demands large enterprises are facing as a result of the global pandemic. Many organizations are experiencing historically high levels of customer interactions at a time when their capacity to support is at an all-time low. By augmenting agents who are on the frontlines, ASAPP enables them to be vastly more efficient and productive, realizing significant savings while delighting customers.” said Founder and CEO Gustavo Sapoznik. “Our current focus is in solving customer experience challenges faced by large enterprises, which for decades has been addressed by attempting to deflect customer calls, and has resulted in poor experiences, frustration, and massive amounts of money being spent on this problem. Our approach to cost savings is radically different and focuses on building state-of-the-art capabilities to make agents better and empower them by augmenting and automating their workflows,” said Sapoznik.

“ASAPP has created an all-in, AI-Native platform which delivers significant savings and superior customer experience,” said investor and ASAPP board member John Doerr. “Gustavo’s world-class team is creating audacious partnerships with large, forward-thinking enterprises. We’re excited to be part of the team by backing ASAPP’s vision.”

Customer care and sales agents use the ASAPP platform to know the right thing to say and the right action to take, in real-time, as the customer conversation transpires on phone calls and digital messages. ASAPP’s machine learning models are continuously learning and predicting from every customer interaction, effectively turning every agent into your best agent without the need for manual programming or extensive training. Many of the world’s largest companies in telecom, financial services, and travel have realized dramatic improvements to both efficiency and effectiveness in how their agents serve customers today.

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The company has seen a massive increase in interest in its platform in recent weeks. The Coronavirus pandemic and resulting economic recession are creating significant disruption at contact centers across all industries. Historically, the execution of efficiency measures – more call deflections, hiding contact information from customers, frustrating chatbots that cannot handle complex transactions – has come at the expense of customer satisfaction. Customer Experience Officers are looking for fast improvements to their operations, to drive significant automation without sacrificing customer experience. ASAPP is uniquely designed to deliver this promise, not by traditional means, but by radically improving agent labor efficiency and effectiveness with artificial intelligence. ASAPP customers have achieved a 2.5x agent throughput increase while realizing a 45%-100% improvement in customer satisfaction scores as a result of using the platform.

With ASAPP, for the first time what is right for the company in the form of lowering costs and improving efficiency, is now also right for the customer: fast, accurate issue resolution and superior experience.

Salesforce Announces Work.com to Help Businesses and Communities Safely Reopen

Salesforce, the global leader in CRM, announced Work.com – new technology solutions and resources to help business and community leaders around the world reopen safely, re-skill employees, and respond efficiently on the heels of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Work.com includes new solutions to accelerate private and public sector response to the COVID-19 pandemic, including employee wellness assessment; shift management; contact tracing; emergency response management; and grants and volunteer management. The Work.com Command Center brings all data streams together so that businesses and communities can make more informed decisions.

In addition, Work.com brings together the full power of health experts, business leaders and the Salesforce ecosystem in a resource center informed by the Business Roundtable and the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) with insights from business, health, and government leaders as well as analysis, best practices and recovery stories from our trusted partner ecosystem.

“Every company and community in the world is focusing on how to safely reopen and get to a new normal,” said Bret Taylor, President, and COO, Salesforce. “With Work.com, we’re bringing together powerful new technology, our partners, and network of experts to help organizations reopen and recover from this crisis while putting employee and visitor health and safety first.”

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“Business Roundtable is focused on an economic recovery that puts public health first and allows businesses of all sizes to reopen swiftly and safely,” said Joshua Bolten, President & CEO of Business Roundtable. “Safety first and consistent guidelines are critical to reopening. Salesforce is providing an important public service by giving businesses and organizations of all sizes this suite of free resources to help them navigate current guidance and get back to business safely when they can do so.”

Afterpay Welcomes Tencent As A Substantial Shareholder

Afterpay Limited is pleased to welcome Tencent Holdings Limited (Tencent) as a substantial shareholder of Afterpay, confirmed by the lodgement of a notice of initial substantial holder on the Australian Securities Exchange on 1 May 2020.

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Tencent is a listed company on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The company provides Internet value-added services, including digital entertainment, online advertising, and FinTech and cloud services to users. Its communications platforms include Weixin, WeChat, and QQ. Its Weixin Pay service is the leading mobile payments platform in China, facilitating an average of over 1 billion commercial transactions per day.

Anthony Eisen and Nick Molnar, Co-founders of Afterpay commented:

“We feel very privileged to welcome Tencent as a substantial shareholder in our business. Being able to attract a strategic investor of this caliber is extremely rewarding and is a testament to our team and the strength of our differentiated business model.

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“Tencent’s investment provides us with the opportunity to learn from one of the world’s most successful digital platform businesses. To be able to tap into Tencent’s vast experience and the network is valuable, as is the potential to collaborate in areas such as technology, geographic expansion, and future payment options on the Afterpay platform.