We have succeeded in raising €8 million to accelerate innovation in self-service and increase our development of customer and employee experience solutions enhanced by artificial intelligence. This fundraising with Elevation Capital Partners and XAnge aims to accelerate the development of our solutions by strengthening our R&D department and to expand our international reach.
Founded in 2011 by 3 engineers, Jérémy Gallemard, Christopher Montémont and Samy Lastmann, to foster co-creation and feedback culture in companies, Smart Tribune shifted its model in 2016, when its co-founders identified a real need among their customers for intelligent self-care solutions to unclog their customer services and meet the need for autonomy among Internet users.
That same year, we decided to launch our first dynamic FAQ solution - SmartFAQ, to respond to the need for autonomy among Internet users and the challenges of customer satisfaction for companies. The arrival of this first automated help center solution confirmed the market's expectations. It was followed by the launch of a conversational chatbot and a platform for centralising and disseminating knowledge for customer service representatives.
Being profitable and financed until now with only equity, Smart Tribune - the French leader in self-service, is today raising its first round of financing for an amount of €8 million from Elevation Capital Partners, which specialises in financing profitable and innovative start-ups, and La Poste Ventures, operated by XAnge, in order to further accelerate the dissemination of our solutions, in France and internationally, while continuing to integrate human and artificial intelligence!
The quality level of our SaaS solutions, as well as their ability to be personalised according to users, context, or issues, have already won over 150 major French and international brands (Leroy Merlin, Carrefour, DPD, Club Med, Macif, Sephora, OUIGO, etc.), operating in some thirty business sectors (banking, insurance, mutual insurance, energy, transport, logistics, travel, press, retail, public services, etc.). Today, Smart Tribune supports them on a daily basis in the personalisation and automation of the customer and employee experience, through innovative digital solutions boosted by AI.
By integrating our self-service solutions, large companies are finally able to deliver truly efficient and personalised customer service by providing the right information at the right time. Furthermore, their advisers are delighted with them because they are empowered, allowing them to delegate low-value answers to the machine and concentrate on resolving more complex or strategic requests.
Our solutions also reassure prospects and customers at every stage of the relationship, providing them with the right information at the right time, 24/7. Finally, internally, they unify and disseminate knowledge by centralising all documents and information supports in a knowledge centre that is always up to date.
We are very proud of this first round of funding and we would like to thank our teams, who are fully invested in the success of Smart Tribune, and our clients, nothing would be possible without them. Today, thanks to the support of our new partners, we will be able to continue to revolutionise the world of self-service within large companies.
Jessica Guérin Haue, Innovation Project Director at La Poste Ventures, said: "La Poste Group is already a user of the solution proposed by Smart Tribune. The investment of La Poste Ventures in this fundraising will strengthen synergies and value creation with the group and its subsidiaries. To support the start-up's development, La Poste Ventures will be represented on the board of directors by Pierre Grauby, the director of customer relations for the group's Consumer and Digital branch.
Benjamin Cohen, co-founder and managing partner of Elevation Capital Partners, said: "We are proud to support Smart Tribune, a leading self-service company, in its development in France and abroad. We were attracted by the quality of the teams, the innovative value proposition of the self-service solution, and the numerous use cases developed. The company's accelerated growth combined with its sound economic fundamentals (recurring revenues, structural profitability, self-financing) convinced us of its strong potential.”
R&D is at the heart of the development of our solutions at Smart Tribune! The Technical and R&D division represents more than 40% of our workforce and we plan to double it within the next 18 months with, in particular, the recruitment of 10 additional IT profiles from the second half of 2023: Data Scientist, UX, AI expert, etc.
As a pioneer in intelligent self-service solutions integrating AI, we will be able to accelerate our development in this direction in order to offer our customers ever more innovative solutions combining the best of technology and people. Our goal is to increase our research in artificial intelligence, natural language processing (NLP), and machine learning by strengthening our technical and R&D teams in order to offer the best personalised self-service solutions adapted to the challenges and needs of large companies in France and abroad.
AI is at the heart of our development, its promises have already been fulfilled and new advances will soon be made to enable us to make our solutions even more effective.
In fact, after testing with several clients over the past few weeks, we are now launching our new offer for generating customer and advisor knowledge bases based on GPT-3. This allows us to automatically generate pre-responses, thus reducing the integration time of a new response by almost 70%.
Our solutions are already used by major companies in nearly 50 countries and are already available in more than 25 languages and different alphabets. Thanks to this fundraising, the objective, by 2024, is to accelerate the internationalisation of Smart Tribune throughout the world while consolidating our leading position in France.
Elevation Capital Partners, the management company of Inter Invest Group, invests in the capital of fast-growing French startups with sound economic fundamentals, positioned on innovative markets and led by ambitious entrepreneurs, according to its analysis. Since its creation in 2015, its objective is to support companies determined to become leading players in their market.
More information on: www.elevation-cp.com
La Poste Ventures is La Poste Group's corporate venture capital fund for start-ups. Launched in June 2021 in partnership with XAnge, this investment fund is designed to identify new services and new customer paths in the group's priority business areas. With €50 million currently available, La Poste Ventures invests in the capital of 5 to 6 start-ups per year, as a minority shareholder, in seed or series A, for investment tickets ranging from €300K to €3 million. Complementing the group's existing innovation support tools, La Poste Ventures selects and supports start-ups that generate value for La Poste Group and its customers.