Webio announces an investment of €2.5m with the round being led by Hambro Perks Growth Debt Fund and includes a further investment from Finch Capital, an existing investor in Webio.
This is Hambro Perks’ first Irish investment, providing €1.75 million of venture debt to Webio, a Dublin-based conversational AI specialist company. Webio received this investment to help drive the continued growth of the business.
Cormac O’Neill, CEO of Webio, said: “We are delighted to be announcing this funding round and to be welcoming Hambro Perks to Team Webio. It’s a real endorsement of our strategy that Finch Capital are also participating in the round as we look to bring the benefits of our conversation Al solutions to the credit and collections industry.”
Webio is a specialist in credit, collections, and payment conversational messaging and has built its own propriety conversational technology specifically for the credit and collections industry. The Webio platform empowers customer engagement with conversational AI, using automated chatbots, Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning to deliver customer conversations in any digital messaging channel, personalised and at scale.
Acting as the ‘central intelligence hub’, Webio orchestrates all the elements needed to have successful customer journeys, enabling the credit industry to positively and empathetically engage indebted and vulnerable customers. The company is on a mission to rebalance the Credit, Collections and Payment ecosystem by reimagining the way lenders engage and converse with customers.
Founded in Dublin in 2016, by Cormac O’Neill, Mark Oppermann and Paul Sweeney, Webio has its headquarters in Temple Bar in Dublin, with subsidiaries in the UK and Poland.
As well as Finch Capital and now Hambro Perks, Webio is also backed by Enterprise Ireland and the European Institute of Innovation & Technology, and the latest funding round will support the business’ ambitious plans for growth.
The deal was led by Stephen Fahy of Hambro Perks Growth Debt Fund, which primarily supports European high-growth scale-up companies with non-dilutive growth capital, focusing on B2B SaaS and IP-rich advanced manufacturing companies in the UK and Ireland (HQ’d in London with an office at Dogpatch Labs in the CHQ Building in Dublin).
Stephen Fahy, Partner in the Growth Debt Fund at Hambro Perks, said: “We are delighted to welcome Webio to the Hambro Perks Growth Debt Fund portfolio. Webio is a dynamic and exciting IP rich company that we are thrilled to be backing and we look forward to supporting their growth plans over the coming years.”
Mike Brennan, Partner at Finch Capital, said: “Webio continues to solve real challenges in the Credit and Collections industry and we are delighted to continue to support their expansion.”
About Webio
For more information about Webio visit https://www.webio.com/
Webio makes having difficult customer conversations easier for Credit, Collections and Payment businesses with trusted conversational AI. Leading UK and Irish brands like The Very Group, Studio Retail, Hoist Finance, DCBL, NCO Europe, and Anglian Water use Webio’s conversational customer engagement platform to orchestrate millions of customer conversations at scale and have convenient and highly personalised conversations. The no-code platform allows Webio customers and partners to get up and running with conversational AI over SMS, WhatsApp, webchat and other channels in hours, not months.
About Hambro Perks Growth Debt Fund
For more information about Hambro Perks visit https://www.hambroperks.com/news
Hambro Perks is an international investment firm backed by leaders in the fields of finance and technology. We enable innovation by investing in breakthrough and growth technology companies. We are proud to be a multi-strategy investor as we believe in the value of broad perspectives. We operate dedicated and specialised teams focused on primary and secondary, early and late stage, debt and equity investments and across a number of high-growth technology markets.
The Hambro Perks Growth Debt Fund supports UK and European high growth scale-up companies with non-dilutive growth capital, with a focus on B2B SaaS and patented hardware companies.
About Finch Capital
For more information about Finch visit https://www.finchcapital.com/
Finch Capital is a growth investor in Europe’s biggest tech transitions, active since 2013. The company has made 45 investments to date and has EUR 500 million AuM. They have offices in Amsterdam, London and Dublin and have a presence in Asia. Their mission is to fund and support the best entrepreneurs creating products that will shape the future of the themes they invest in. Finch Capital leverages their international network and industry expertise to enable their portfolio companies to grow into leaders in their field.