Upsy Company, the Finnish ecommerce product helping smaller businesses compete has just picked up €1.2 million. The seed funding was led by Gorilla Capital, followed by Korpun Siemen, Sijoittaja Pro’s Investor group, a number of private investors and Business Finland.
Upsy Shopping Helper, founded in 2021, is a SaaS-based solution for digital retailers, that helps people find the product they need and make a purchase decision. Based on Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing Systems, Upsy communicates with the customer like a human to help turn visitors to an online store into buyers amidst this increasingly competitive ecommerce environment.
The Helsinki-based startup aims to be the global leader in the shopping assistant category, focusing on the SME ecommerce segment. This is a market area with huge potential as more and more small and local businesses are going digital and trying to compete with online giants such as Amazon. Upsy is offering a solution that can help these online shopping sites take on the ecommerce titans and become successful businesses.
Juha Sulkakoski, CEO, said: “Upsy improves webshops conversion and boosts average purchase. Upsy acts like a human salesperson, making ecommerce visitors into buyers. It helps a customer to find the right product, offers options, recommends additional purchases, and answers the most common questions. It works fully automatically and requires no teaching or holding hands.”
Tightened global competition, the dominance of big players like Amazon and rising customer acquisition costs are significant challenges for online stores. The most significant challenge for smaller online stores is turning the visitors into buyers – the obstacle is burning is often finding the right product and product information, or, that the customer isn’t getting the answers to the questions that they have. The Upsy product is easy-to-integrate and a real game-changer for owners of ecommerce sites.
Large players in the ecommerce sector like Amazon have the resources to invest in human-operated customer service and customized artificial intelligence solutions that help convert a consumer to a buyer. Until Upsy, this hasn’t been available for small and medium-sized online stores due to the cost and complexity of the solutions.
The fresh capital will be used to further product development, the opening of new international markets and the further development of the product’s artificial intelligence and neural networks capabilities as part of the aim to lead the shopping assistant category on a global level.
Matias Itkonen, Investor Pro, commented: “Upsy has developed a necessary and cost-effective sales assistant for small online stores. When you combine the teams’ extensive experience in ecommerce and our shared views on the company’s development, it’s great to join the company’s growth story!”
