Laiye, an intelligent automation company, has acquired Mindsay, a European enterprise chatbot and voicebot platform for an undisclosed amount. The startup will play a crucial part in Laiye’s international expansion six years after its launch, becoming the company’s default chatbot technology in all areas outside of China. Laiye also intends to open a new R&D centre in Paris.
Laporte will become the General Manager of Laiye’s international chatbot business as a result of this acquisition. Ilias Hicham and Pierre Pakey, co-founders of Mindsay, will lead Laiye’s worldwide chatbot business as Head of Product and the Intelligent Document Process product line as Head of Product Innovation, respectively.
Why the acquisition?
Chatbots are undoubtedly becoming more common. According to Insider Intelligence, consumer retail spending via chatbots will reach $142B by 2024, up from $2.8B in 2019.
Businesses that use chatbots can save money in areas like customer service because automation replaces human agents, increases efficiency, and frees up employees to do more value-added work. Customers like them, too; chatbots are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and can often answer questions faster than a human sales agent.
As a method of survival in a post-pandemic world, the report further believes that a digital workforce will compel enterprises to accelerate their digital business transformation plans by at least five years.
However, several customers have expressed their dissatisfaction. Some chatbots are either too slow or altogether incapable at resolving a problem. Often, they’re not well integrated with the rest of the customer support staff, so clients have to wait a long time to speak with a human agent about a problem the chatbot couldn’t solve, and then have to repeat all of the information they’ve already given.
It’s understandable that there may be disappointments in a market with at least 1,800 chatbot providers. What’s more surprising is that the huge internet companies who provide the basis for many chatbot technologies are failing to address the issue.
“Laiye and Mindsay were formed with the same goal in mind: to assist businesses in digital transformation so that they may become more productive, efficient, and successful. This acquisition follows Laiye’s $50M investment in the EMEA region. It’s a huge step forward in our mission to build the most comprehensive Intelligent Automation solution possible, making it affordable and accessible to help organisations do and be better “Chairman and CEO of Laiye, Guanchun Wang, stated.
“With the acquisition of Mindsay, we now have access to a powerful low-code and no-code solution for automating customer care and back-office procedures for our clients.” You have a cutting-edge platform to digitise and automate essential portions of your organisation when you combine that with our robotic process automation offering to simplify repetitive operations and a conversational interface that understands human language,” said Ronen Lamdan, CEO International of Laiye.
Mindsay: the chatbot expert
Using conversational Al, Mindsay makes customer interactions simple and efficient. With Mindsay’s no-code and low-code Conversational Ai platform, brands can simply build powerful chatbots and voicebots without the help of IT. Mindsay, based in Paris, provides services to prominent brands in retail, travel & hospitality, and finance.
Mindsay’s CEO and Co-Founder Guillaume Laporte stated, “More enterprises are realising the importance of chatbots driven by conversational Al in offering compelling self-service experiences, and Mindsay has been at the forefront of this movement. We’re ecstatic to be joining Laiye at this critical juncture. The exceptional quality of Laiye’s personnel and technology has blown us away. We will be able to give more value to our clients around the world if we work together.”
