It's my pleasure to announce that we've just successfully closed our latest funding round of $2.5M with our lead investor Elevator Ventures (EV).
Our engagement with EV goes back to 2018. We met a team from RBI, Elevator Ventures' parent company, at an EFMA event in London where we had a chance to showcase our solutions and learn more about their fintech partnership program, Elevator Lab.
We felt that this was a great opportunity for us to work closely with one of the largest banks in Central and Eastern Europe that would allow us to tailor our solutions further for the specific challenges of the region. So we applied for Elevator Lab and as a result, we were awarded PoC projects in Bulgaria and Kosovo. Years went by and we expanded our projects successfully within RBI, which ultimately led to discussions with Elevator Ventures around bringing them onboard as lead investors for our funding round — which brings us to today.
We're thrilled to have EV onboard not only because of the knowledge and experience they bring to the table, but also because they are a prime example of our customer-centric mindset. While other companies might be reluctant to have their customers so close as investors, we embrace this opportunity. Because we believe that the greatest companies, the ones that will win, are those who are closest to their customers.
Some of you that have been with us since the early days of our journey, know that this isn't anything new to Pisano. We've worked closely with customers in the past, like bringing on Vestel Ventures as investors in 2018 after having Vestel as our customer for years. And we'll continue to do so in the future.
And talking about the future, I'd like to take this opportunity to give you a glimpse into what we're working on today and how we'll put this new capital to work for you.
Expanding our community and reach
We're determined to spread our customer-centric philosophy to the world by expanding our community. Delivering value to professionals around the world by sharing the things we're learning along the way with great content and community gatherings.
As a matter of fact, just a few weeks ago, we announced one of our most ambitious community projects ever: Pisano Academy. This will be an online space where people can share their experiences around customer and employee experience management. A place where we'll publish work together with experts both internally and externally to produce the best, most useful content. And much more.
We believe the best way to create an exceptional business is by employing the best people, following the best strategies and by leveraging the best technology. One doesn't work without the other. We know that our customers are proud to have the best people in their teams — so we're working hard to offer them the best strategies and technology to empower them fully.
Improving our existing products
Today our products are being used by thousands of users in more than 20 countries across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific. We're working on improvements across the board to enhance the user experience as well as capabilities going forward.
In addition to managing customer experience, some of our trail-blazing customers have been using our products for managing employee experience as well. Watching how they're using our platform has been immensely insightful for us and in order to serve them better, we're working on a number of improvements and some all-new functionality to expand capabilities around employee experience and engagement management. In the long-term we're confident that these relatively new developments will enable businesses to drive even more value and create exceptional experiences.
AI and machine learning is an area that we've been investing in for a while now. We've employed these advanced algorithms to detect spam, categorize data and infer customer sentiment. And these features together have saved countless amounts of resources for our customers to date. We're continuing our investment in this space to bring advancements around prediction and AI powered reporting in the short term. As well as some smart features around recommendations.
All of these new improvements will be deployed without losing focus on our core strengths as a platform, while enhancing our user experience and preserving unique user-friendly look & feel our customers have come to expect from us.
Even more ways for you to listen, respond and sell
In addition to incremental improvements we're also working on all-new ways to listen, respond and sell using the Pisano platform.
New capabilities around emerging channels in the social space, plug-and-play third party channels, as well as advanced capabilities around Chatbots are all in the works and we'll be sharing these with you soon. So stay tuned.
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With this new round Pisano is even stronger than ever. We know that our company's health and stability is very important, especially for our customers. We know that you're trusting us with your customers and we take this responsibility very seriously.
So we're thrilled to have achieved this milestone, especially in these difficult times we're going through worldwide. We're looking forward to working hard on the challenges to come and delivering the most value for our customers, employees and investors.
Thank you for your support and believing in the Pisano mission!
