Paris-based Mindsay, a startup which has created an automated sales representative to provide companies with personalised customer care at scale, has raised a Series A round of €10 million. The round was led by White Star Capital, with participation from previous investors Partech and two of Mindsay’s current clients, Paris Aeroports and Accor.
Mindsay offers conversational assistants in the form of chatbots and voicebots, which can be integrated with companies’ websites, mobile applications, or social media interfaces – including Facebook, WhatsApp, WeChat, Alexa, and Google Assistant.
Since it was founded in 2016, Mindsay has answered 12 million messages on behalf of major brands such as Iberia and SNCF and achieved revenue growth of more than 300% YoY. With customers in five different countries, the volume of messages answered by Mindsay is growing at over 20% each month. Over the next 18 months, the company plans to grow its team from 40 to 120 people in Paris, Madrid and the US to support its expansion.
Mindsay has seen increasing demand for its product across multiple industries but has especially seen success working with major travel companies. These include airline giant IAG (British Airways, Iberia, Vueling), the airport operator Groupe ADP, rail operators across Europe, and the world leader in amusement parks, Disney.
Having built a solid foundation of clients in the travel and mobility sector, Mindsay is now looking to expand its offering to the retail sector, which faces similar challenges of increasing consumer demand for fast and convenient brand communication.
The funding will also be used to deploy Mindsay’s reinforcement learning model that allows conversational assistants to improve using real-time conversations, in order to continuously increase the performance of its conversational solutions.
“In a relatively short period of time Mindsay has achieved the two things that we consider essential to a startup’s success,” said Matthieu Lattes, General Partner at White Star Capital. “Firstly, combining a leading team of data scientists and machine learning engineers with expertise in the field, and secondly, impressive examples of commercial success with major companies, proving the relevance of its model,”
“Through the creation of self-learning conversational marketing tools (virtual agents), our mission is to provide the most effective and precise answers to the most frequently asked questions from online customers,” explains Guillaume Laporte, CEO of Mindsay. “This improves customer engagement and satisfaction and reduces workload for customer support teams by 80%, allowing customer service teams to focus on complex requests and drive efficiency.”
“With more than 100 million passengers travelling through our airports in 2018, the ADP Group is working daily to improve and personalize our passenger’s experience throughout their journey,” said Edward Arkwright, Executive Director of the ADP Group. “In this context, the conversation tool developed by Mindsay, currently being deployed, is a powerful vector for exchanges with our customers, which allows, through our digital tools, privileged and direct access to our airports at any time.”
