Limitless Technology, the London-based inventor and provider of a SaaS platform offering AI and crowd sourced customer service solutions, today announces it has successfully raised £5million in Series A funding.
The funding is led by AlbionVC, with participation from all existing investors including Downing Ventures and Unilever Ventures. It will now enable the provider to continue successfully disrupting the customer service industry as it further develops its SmartCrowd™ platform.
SmartCrowd™ uses AI and crowd-sourcing to help businesses transform their customer experience by turning their most loyal customers into freelance customer experts and rewards them for providing on-demand support. Since launching in 2018, it now consists of four solutions to help businesses meet their various customer experience and insight needs – CrowdService®, CrowdCoach™, CrowdAdvise™ and CrowdFeedback™.
Limitless enables any brand to connect to its SmartCrowd™ platform in four simple steps:
- Build a qualified crowd of powerful Customer Experts, in any language or market through a unique digital onboarding process.
- Connect the SmartCrowd™ platform to the brand’s existing digital channels to maintain a single customer view.
- Use SmartAI™ to deliver the perfect automated response or route the task to the best Expert for a fast and helpful response.
- Rewarding freelance Customer Experts for resolving support queries – with Experts having the flexibility to earn on their own schedule and in their local currency.
Globally, over 100 brands are already using SmartCrowd™ technology to deliver amazing customer experiences. This includes international and multi-product support for global enterprises such as Unilever, Microsoft, Daily Mail Group, National Express, Wargaming, Northumbrian Water and Amazon.
Brands which adopt SmartCrowd have seen significant reduction in costs by up to 50%. They are also seeing a dramatic increase in customer satisfaction thanks to the benefit from having an ‘always open’ 24/7 customer service operation, in any language, due to a flexible talent pool of Experts.
With the new funding, Limitless will further develop its core SmartCrowd™ technology to help businesses access diverse, agile and flexible talent in any language across the world. The investment will also be used to enhance its machine learning technology, which sits at the heart of its SmartAI™ solution. Limitless also intends to use the capital to aggressively grow its sales and marketing efforts in the UK and US and expand our operations in India.
Robert Whitby-Smith, Partner, AlbionVC comments, “There is an opportunity for brands to transform their customer service by leveraging the power of the crowd. Creating a customer community which engages and rewards customers for helping other customers is the future – it is better, faster and cheaper. However, executing this at scale needs a rare combination of tech savvy and deep domain expertise – which Team Limitless have in spades from the previous business they built. We are proud to support Roger and Megan achieve their exciting vision.”
Stan Sthanunathan, Executive Vice President – Consumer & Market Insights at Unilever Ventures says: “Today’s consumers want more insightful and faster responses and Limitless offers us a way to provide this by leveraging the knowledge and enthusiasm of some of our biggest brand advocates.
Today, we’ve rolled out Limitless in 5 of our global markets and we’re on track to expand this freelance service model across 19 of our global markets this year.
Unilever Ventures is passionate about investing in young and promising technologies, helping support their growth by providing access to our global network and expertise. The future looks exciting for Limitless and we are thrilled to be on this journey with them.”
Roger Beadle, CEO and co-founder of Limitless says, “We are delighted to have secured this round of funding with our investors, which will help us take our promise of ‘an on-demand, flexible talent pool of Customer Experts’ to more businesses around the world.
Morgan Stanley predicts that within 10 years 50% of US workers will be freelancers. This growth is being driven by millennials who will account for more than a third of the global workforce by 2020 according to EY, and businesses need to embrace their new attitudes and approaches. Limitless is perfectly poised to help enterprises embrace this change, whilst boosting their customer service efforts. We firmly believe that crowd sourcing, together with AI, will become an integral part of an ecosystem of technologies that will fundamentally change the future of customer engagement.”
Megan Neale, COO and co-founder of Limitless concludes, “Limitless harnesses the combined power of brand lovers, marketplace technology and good gig principles to help our clients transform customer service into a truly valued customer experience. Our vision is to completely redefine a multi-billion-dollar industry by delivering exceptional experiences for everyone. We are privileged to share that vision with Albion Capital, Downing Ventures and Unilever Ventures and look forward to a partnership that will enable Limitless to scale globally in the next 2 years.”
About Limitless:
Limitless is disrupting the customer service industry by enabling organisations to crowd source customer support. Limitless helps brands find, manage and reward ‘Customer Experts’. Experts can be the brand’s own existing loyal customers, partners and employees – who use a simple app to provide support to other customers and receive a reward for resolving them. They can dip into the app at a time and place which suits them. They can answer as many, or as few, customer queries as they like. Limitless calls this Crowd Service.
All over the world companies are seeing customer service costs spiral and the traditional customer service model is struggling to cope. Limitless addresses some of the biggest challenges faced by the contact centre industry – low pay, high attrition and access to new talent. The SmartCrowd™ platform enables companies to attract and reward highly skilled freelancers, providing amazing service to others at a significantly reduced cost. For more details visit www.belimiless.io
About AlbionVC:
The Albion technology team invests from seed through to Series B in high growth companies, predominantly in the UK, with a particular focus on B2B software and technology enabled services. Albion has 20+ years’ experience investing in technology, has c.£450m of venture funds, with over 40 tech investments within its portfolios. AlbionVC is the technology investment arm of Albion Capital Group LLP, which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. www.albion.vc
About Downing Ventures:
Downing Ventures is the venture capital arm of Downing LLP and has been investing in Seed to Series B companies since 2015. The fund has a portfolio of 59 companies as at January 2019 across a variety of technology sectors including consumer internet and mobile, enterprise software, financial technology and health technology.
About Unilever Ventures:
Unilever Ventures is the venture capital and private equity arm of Unilever. They invest in early stage, promising companies, accelerating growth by providing access to Unilever’s global ecosystem, assets and expertise. The fund looks to invest in tomorrow’s world beaters in Personal Care and Digital Transformation. Key focus areas within Digital Transformation include content creation, data analytics, e-commerce, internet of things, mobile marketing, social media, and video in both developed and emerging markets.