Kaizan, a London-based B2B startup that develops a communication platform designed for the workplace, announced on Wednesday that it has secured a $1.2M pre-seed funding round led by Jigsaw VC (also invested in financial platform Payhawk)
Several Angles, including Entrepreneur First, Charlotte St Capital, Founders Factory, Silicon Roundabout Ventures, NICE, Ledger, IPONWEB, MIQ, and Gtmhub, participated.
Jigsaw is an early-stage venture fund that uses data, systems, and networks to identify, and support entrepreneurial talent.
On Kaizan’s investment, Dan Jones, co-founder & managing partner, adds, “There is a huge repository of embedded insights and intelligence trapped within the growing volumes of corporate documents, emails, and communication in tools like G Meet, Zoom, Slack. By aggregating data and insights across the enterprise, the possibilities are profound. Kaizan’s platform offers game-changing possibilities to shift enterprise productivity and CRM tools from a transactional system of record to a relational intelligence platform that drives revenue”.
How will the funding be used?
The investment will enable Kaizan to accelerate its R&D into an innovative intelligent AI for client success teams to guide them on how to increase revenue and client happiness.
“We’re building out the engineering and product team so we can accelerate development to meet the requirements of our beta customers,” says Glen Calvert, co-founder, and CEO of Kaizan.
We at TFN had a chat with Glen Calvert to find out more about the company’s birth, its AI technology, challenges, and much more.
How was Kaizan born?
Kaizan’s founding team – Glen Calvert and Pravin Paratey experienced the problem of optimising teams responsible for managing clients and revenue in their previous startups.
The teams responsible for ensuring client happiness, retention, and growth have been overlooked for too long. Also, solutions specific to Client Teams in the professional service industry are non-existent. And that’s what Kaizan aims to change.
Explaining this Calvert shares, “We wanted to build an AI to guide companies to improve the client experience and generate revenue by harnessing the collective intelligence in organisations and guiding people on how to scale their clients. Covid and breakthroughs in NLP meant now was the perfect time to build an AI for Client Success teams.”
Market, revenue model, and challenges
The company’s emergence coincides with a growing global demand for digital solutions for client retention and growth. Gartner reveals that over 80% of client interactions will occur in digital channels, and whilst customer support software is a $350B industry.
Throwing light on this, Calvert adds, “Revenue enablement and tooling is $66B+ market, but it’s all focussed on sales teams and pipeline optimisation. Not specifically built for Client Success teams and how they can scale their enterprise relationships.”
On the revenue model, he states, “We provide a SaaS solution to provide visibility on client health and cues on how to scale your clients, as professional services is a $5T market there are lots of uncapped upsides to explore,”
Each set of the business has its own set of challenges and demands. Kaizan is no different!
“Our biggest challenge is technological. Extracting key info from unstructured qualitative data in order to automate workflows and surface insights has lots of nuance and challenges. There are many approaches, some yield better results than others, but the R&D is invaluable. We’re also figuring out the UX for an AI that guides CS teams in their workflows, so there’s a lot of UX and UI challenges that come with building an ambient AI for a team,” explains Calvert.
How does Kaizan works?
Kaizan is building an intelligence platform that acts like “Siri for client success teams” using Natural Language Processing (NLP). The company’s AI platform notes and reports what’s important for communication, helping teams amplify their abilities at work.
Explaining the technology Calvert, states, “Kaizan has built an ‘NLP first’ approach to our technology stack, meaning we’re built to process different types of unstructured digital communication and apply our language models for a variety of purposes; summarisation, topic extraction, language generation, Q&A.”
By automating workflows and providing guidance on how to scale each client, Kaizan enhances relationship management and accelerates revenue retention and growth.
Unlike CRMs, Project Management Tools, and Spreadsheets, Kaizan proactively and intelligently assists Client Managers in how to manage and scaling their client relationships.
As of now, the company works with customers, including Bidstack PLC, Fnatic, and Scale Digital. Simultaneously, the company is onboarding several clients as well in conjunction with their roadmap and release schedule.
The future
Kaizan is currently part of Founders Factory’s AI programme, which aims to further the platform’s development alongside Founders Factory’s portfolio and corporate partners.
“We’re just starting to scratch the surface of the capabilities of language interfaces and the intelligence to offer end-users the ability to truly augment their workflows and decision making. Kaizan will be the category leader in a new field of intelligent systems that guide companies and their client success teams on how to increase client happiness and revenue,” he concludes.
