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It is common in the United States for companies with physical branches and online services to use customer relationship management (CRM) software that keeps track of all their interactions with customers in one place. But this is not the case in Latin America, where many companies and banks keep data from physical locations isolated from their digital counterpart. Nomiya wants to change that.
Argentina-based Numia’s technology helps businesses consolidate their customer service channels into a single platform using artificial intelligence. The platform is vendor-agnostic and can connect to bank kiosks, tablets, and even software like Salesforce and Genesys. Businesses looking to use Numia can pick and choose which integrations they want to connect. The company works with large organizations across categories including banking, healthcare, insurance and more.
Numia co-founder and CEO Gustavo Lauria (pictured above, middle) told TechCrunch that the company was originally founded in 2014 as queue management software to help businesses like banks and pharmacies manage their physical offices. The company decided to focus on its existing strategy in 2020 after seeing that customers were not connecting the data they obtained from their physical locations to their online platforms.
“There was a lot to do offline, and offline was, and still is, a very neglected area,” Loria said. “(Numia) is basically a customer journey manager that basically brings together these two worlds, the physical and the digital, to seamlessly integrate them and be able to manage different customer journeys.”
Collecting all this data in one place leads to more efficient interactions with customers, Loria said. It makes it easier for businesses to connect their customers with human customer service representatives if it makes sense to have an offline interaction. And some tasks that would have been completed by a human representative in a physical branch can now be taken care of by AI agents.
“It gave us kind of a CRM superpower, because we had greater access to CRM in a way,” Loria said. “So we made them reach even further offline, and we also made them communicate online. Of course, online there are more tools; what we give them is the possibility to integrate everything.
The company now has more than 350 clients in 10 Latin American countries including major institutions such as Santander Bank, HSBC, Allianz and others.
Numia is profitable and on track to end the year with between $4.7 million and $5 million in reserved ARR, Loria said. He added that the company is looking to double that over the next two years. The company has avoided taking on venture financing in its ten-year history so far.
Numia announces a $3.5 million seed funding round led by Cometa with participation from MatterScale Ventures and London-based Boost Capital Partners, among others.
Loria said the company decided to raise outside capital so it could get closer to its potential clients — many of whom are limited partners in venture funds from which Nomiya was looking to raise money. It also allowed them to get the resources they needed to expand their customer base.
“For us to be able to have all these resources, and be at all the conferences we want, and the number of account executives, we need to be talking to these vice presidents of the bank all the time, and that requires a lot of resources,” Loria said. “Raising capital was the most logical decision for us.”
Loria said the fundraising journey did not start off easily, as he found that many investors did not understand why the profitable 10-year-old company was raising capital in the first place. Once Cometa agreed to lead the tour, he said, it started to get easier.
Loria said the company plans to allocate 70% of the capital to marketing, sales and recruitment, while the other 30% will be allocated to improving and building technology. The company wants to continue expanding its capabilities to give customers more integration options. It is also looking to improve AI technology to bring more efficiencies to the customer journey.
“Companies sell more by providing more personalized trips to customers,” Loria said. “It’s not just about how I make you more; I help you be more efficient. I make you sell more by making more of the trip.”
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