Gorgias
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Customer support startup Gorgias raises $25M
Gorgias announced today that it has raised $25 million in Series B funding, bringing the startup’s pre-money valuation to $300 million.
When the company raised its Series A just over a year ago, CEO Romain Lapeyre (who founded Gorgias with CTO Alex Plugaru) told me that it works with e-commerce businesses to automate responses to their most common customer service questions, while also providing tools that help the support team respond more quickly and even convince customers to buy additional products and services.
Gorgias says it now supports more than 4,500 stores, including Steve Madden, Timbuk2, Fjällräven, Marine Layer, Ellana, Electrolux and Sergio Tacchini. And revenue has grown 200% this year.
That may not be surprising, given the overall growth in e-commerce during the pandemic. As Lapeyre put it, merchants saw “a huge boost” in online orders, which resulted in a similar rise in customer service requests — so they’re increasingly turning to Gorgias for help.
Initially, Lapeyre said merchants are just eager to respond to their customers more quickly and to make their support team more efficient. But over time, they become more interested in using customer support “as way to drive sales.” In fact, he recalled talking to one business that used to compensate its support team based on response time and now offers them a sales commission.
Image Credits: Gorgias
He said he expects these trends to continue after the pandemic ends: “We just jumped five years into the future.”
Gorgias has now raised a total of $40 million. The new round was led by Sapphire Ventures, with participation from SaaStr, Alven, Amplify Partners, CRV and Greycroft.
Lapeyere said the money will allow Gorgias to continue hiring (it went from a team of 30 people to more 100 people this year), particularly on the engineering side, where it can develop even more automation for the platform.
“As consumers increasingly shop online, the Gorgias platform powers a new breed of customer support for high-growth e-commerce brands,” said Sapphire Ventures Managing Director Rajeev Dham in a statement. “Co-founder and CEO Romain Lapeyre and team have built an incredible product that provides e-commerce merchants with a single app to manage all of their customer communications — ultimately delivering a far better customer experience.”
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Gorgias raises $14M to help e-commerce companies deliver faster (and more lucrative) customer service
Gorgias, a startup offering artificial intelligence tools for customer service and support, is announcing that it has raised $14 million in Series A funding.
Co-founder and CEO Romain Lapeyre told me that the startup is taking advantage of a broader shift as brands are looking to sell directly to consumers, rather than going through intermediaries like Amazon — for example, he pointed to Nike’s recent decision to pull its products from Amazon.
As brands make this change, Lapeyre (pictured above with his co-founder and CTO Alex Plugaru) said they need a “bundle of tools” to build their online business, and “each little part of the bundle is separate.” So they might create a store with Shopify, accept payments via Stripe — and naturally, Lapeyre believes they should be handling their customer support through Gorgias .
The product integrates with Shopify, using AI and customer data to automate responses to basic questions like, “What’s my tracking number?” By doing this, the business can free customer service representatives from spending most of their time responding to these routine requests, and the customers get faster answers.
“The automation should just be the very basic questions,” Lapeyre added.
But even when it comes to more complex queries, Gorgias also provides tools that help the customer service representatives to respond more quickly and to upsell customers on additional products and services — Lapeyre said they’re acting as “sales associates rather than customer service agents.”
It seems like this approach is becoming a reality at some of Gorgias’ 2,000 customers — the Groovelife customer service team gets paid a commission based on upselling. At Steve Madden, meanwhile, the customer service team is using automation to respond to 20% of tickets.
Gorgias previously raised $3.5 million in seed funding. The new round was led by Flex Capital, with participation of SaaStr, Alven, CRV, Amplify Partners and Eric Yuan.
Lapeyre said Gorgias will use the money to build out the product with new features while also bringing on more merchants.
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