While we typically associate customer service with today’s demanding consumers and the emergence of popular DTC brands, B2B companies that manufacture complex, technical equipment such as medical devices have customer service needs too. In fact, enterprise customer service is faced with the challenge of educating customer service teams to understand challenging problems and specialized products. Aquant is the service intelligence platform that uses AI to capture and transform customer insights/reviews and information from industry experts into information that is digestible and comprehensible, meaning your customer service team can provide proactive, smart customer service. Aquant’s service is used by major clients like The Home Depot and Johnson and Johnson.
AlleyWatch interviewed Aquant’s founding team to learn more about the recent funding round, raising the total funding amount to $42.6M across two rounds, and what made investors return for this Series B round.
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
Aquant raised a $30M Series B round, led by Insight Partners with participation from existing investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Angular Ventures, and Silvertech Ventures.
Tell us about the product or service that Aquant offers.
Aquant’s service intelligence platform helps leading manufacturing companies and other large enterprises empower their service teams with tribal knowledge, so they can provide better customer service. The AI technology captures the knowledge of top performers by unlocking insights from clients’ data silos (e.g., CRMs and ERP systems), analyzing the free-text of customer comments and field technician notes, and validating findings with subject matter experts. The platform then delivers prescriptive insights to every member of the service team, helping technicians and agents resolve customer challenges like experts, and service leaders make informed management decisions.
What inspired the start of Aquant?
My cofounder and I have a combined 25 years in the field service space. We observed that many enterprise companies we worked with were focused on making the process of servicing customer complaints more efficient – shaving a few miles off technicians’ travel to job sites, or having agents spend less time on the phone, instead of focusing on the prevention and quick resolution of the problems themselves. There was not technology available to tackle the fundamental challenge of service team members making the wrong decision for how to fix problems – a challenge that is costing the industry untold dollars in wasted resources and customer churn. Aquant was purpose-built to address this problem by giving customer service pros the information they need to fix and even prevent problems the first time.
Nominations are now open for AlleyWatch’s 2020 NYC Tech Influencers feature. Know someone amazing who belongs on this list? Nominate them today here. Nominations open until 2/4. Looking to drive targeted response from the NYC Tech community at scale, learn more about partnering with AlleyWatch on this initiative here.
How is Aquant different?
Aquant has a unique 3-layer approach to getting valuable insights from the organizations we work with.
We combine data scattered in organizational silos and databases and bring that data together to develop a comprehensive picture of our clients’ operations. Next, we use Aquant’s purpose-built NLP service engine to analyze unstructured data – the valuable insights hidden in free-text sources like technician notes that used to be impossible to assess.
Once we unlock this free text, we then use AI and machine learning to develop a service neural network. By mimicking human decision making, the service neural network provides the right answers for service challenges.
And finally, we augment the data with human intelligence and insight. Aquant built tools to capture these insights from subject matter experts and digitally transform these insights so that even when long time experts retire, our intelligence platform can record and democratize their wisdom.
Who do you consider to be your primary competitors?
Aquant has a unique product offering, and we have not encountered direct competitors.
What market does Aquant target and how big is it?
Aquant serves companies that manufacture and service complex equipment, including capital equipment, medical device manufacturing, and communications. Medical devices alone are a $156B medical device market in the United States.
What’s your business model?
Aquant offers a Software as a Service platform to enterprise clients across the manufacturing, telecom, utilities, and medical device spaces. Our platform is used by service teams to predict and prescribe service decisions, from diagnosing machinery problems to assessing risk of customer churn.
What was the funding process like?
It was gratifying to see the enthusiasm from investors about our technology and the results we’ve been able to generate from our clients. Several of our partners also participated in our Series A round in late 2018, and we’re thankful for their continued support.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
We were pleased that the fundraising process moved quickly. It’s a challenge to balance the time-intensive investment process with the responsibilities of running the business.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
The recommitment from our existing investors speaks to their continued faith in our vision, team, and approach. Insight Partners, who led the round, cited our experience and understanding of the field service space and our unique opportunity to build something disruptive.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
We will be releasing new products to help enterprise leaders predict and prescribe every decision in the service lifecycle. We’ll also be expanding our go-to-market, engineering, and operational teams.
We will be releasing new products to help enterprise leaders predict and prescribe every decision in the service lifecycle.
What advice can you offer companies in New York that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
Prioritize researching and understanding the pain of your market and make all of your product development decisions around that pain.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
We’re going global, to meet the service challenges of international clients. We will also be developing products focused on addressing the unique challenges of the industries we work with.
What’s your favorite restaurant in the city?
Bond Street!
Nominations are now open for AlleyWatch’s 2020 NYC Tech Influencers feature. Know someone amazing who belongs on this list? Nominate them today here. Nominations open until 2/4. Looking to drive targeted response from the NYC Tech community at scale, learn more about partnering with AlleyWatch on this initiative here.
