Operative Intelligence, a downtown-based software development company focused on AI platforms and customer analytics, raised $3.5 million in its inaugural funding raise, which closed earlier this month.
In its own words, the company provides a first-of-its-kind “Demand-Insights-as-a-Service platform” that equips contact centers and businesses with “irrefutable data to make meaningful changes in the way they serve customers as an organization, tied directly to bottom line revenue.”
Co-founded in 2019 by brothers Peter and James Iansek to address the “100-billion-dollar market problem” plaguing customer service and contact centers, the firm says its AI platform helps companies quickly identify the problems that are causing increased call wait times, poor inquiry resolution, and non-intuitive menu options.
Peter Iansek, who serves as chief executive, told the Business Journal that the latest investment “will allow us to accommodate our rapid growth projections and propel our journey to help thousands of organizations to unlock the true value of their customer service interactions, at scale.
“We’re looking to double team our size in the next 18 months (from 15 to 30) and expand around key areas of product, including sales, marketing and customer success, which will be largely based specifically around the US market,” Iansek added.
Iansek emphasized that Operative Intelligence is focused on servicing clients “at scale,” which he summarized as “servicing actionable insights … off enormous data sets to meet the needs as efficiently as possible for customers across multiple channels.”
Being able to offer an algorithm-driven proportional response is particularly valuable to clients in times of economic uncertainty, said Iansek.
“One thing is that running a contact center has always been really rough, and it’s even more difficult today. For a regular enterprise contact center, supporting millions of customers every year, the increasing complexity of servicing customers has been a really difficult problem to scale toward,” said Iansek.
James Iansek, the company’s chief product officer, said Operative Intelligence is looking to address the inefficiencies in contact centers, noting “there’s over $49 billion in pure waste every year in customer service that’s just re-work in the US alone.”
“I had a hypothesis we could leverage machines and software to unlock the insight needed to fill the gap for businesses and Pete knew what it took to get a startup off the ground; we both knew we had to give it a go,” said James Iansek.
The funding was led by the Santa Monica-based Bonfire Ventures — which focuses on seed-stage investments in business-to-business software companies — with support from Malibu-based Wonder Ventures.
Iansek said the funding would be used to expand the company’s software development and support teams, and to scale its customer intelligence product capabilities “for the world’s leading enterprise companies.”
In a written statement accompanying the Dec. 6 announcement, Bonfire Ventures Managing Director Mark Mullen said that Operative Intelligence had made “impressive strides” towards modernizing contact center solutions.
“James and Peter have built an intuitive solution to improve the customer experience at a time where needs are heightened. We look forward to their next moves to utilize AI technology to reshape an untapped space,” he said in a statement.
