- Low-code customer engagement platform Airkit announced it has raised $28 million in funding
Airkit — a low-code platform for customer engagement — announced the general availability of its solution for building customer experiences. And the company announced it raised $28 million in funding from Accel, Emergence Capital, and Salesforce Ventures.
Airkit CEO Stephen Ehikian and CTO Adam Evans were previously the COO and CTO/co-founder, respectively of RelateIQ — which is a relationship intelligence company acquired by Salesforce.com in 2014. And Airkit counts SkipTheDishes, Turo, Agero, EZR, and a number of other early customers who have deployed digital customer experiences on its platform.
Companies have been focused on customer experience because buyers increasingly favor brands with hyper-personalized, end-to-end, and digital self-service that meets them where they are. And according to a recent study by American Express, over 60% of US consumers prefer automated self-service such as a website or mobile app for simple customer service tasks and consumer preference for mobile customer service has grown by 71% since 2014.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the demand for effective, touchless, and self-service options has only increased across all industries and many companies have struggled to scale and improve their offerings. Research firm IDC reported that the total market for Customer Experience Technology is estimated at $641 billion in 2022. And the challenge for most companies is the limited availability of developers and the slow and complex process of building even basic digital customer experiences.
With its first low-code platform purpose-built for customer engagement, Airkit enables any team to quickly and reliably build hyper-personalized and end-to-end customer journeys that are powered by existing systems. And the result is a new level of agility and innovation in customer experience for any company, whether they are digital-first technology companies or established brands.
Airkit is delivering a low-code platform that enables businesses to streamline and empower the customer experience (CX) while significantly decreasing time to market. And with Airkit, business users or developers can assemble prebuilt templates, data objects and integrations into powerful customer journeys in a matter of days versus months across phone, SMS, web, chat and other channels — which boosts both customer engagement and employee productivity.
Airkit’s suite of restful APIs allows users to create out-of-the-box integrations for hyper-personalized, end-to-end interactions quickly, for every customer need. And Airkit was purpose-built for instantaneous, transient customer experiences, and integrates with native platforms like Salesforce, Zendesk, Microsoft, Looker, SAP, Twilio, Stripe, Marketo, and many others to empower businesses to fully leverage each customer touch point.
KEY QUOTES:
“The opportunity to truly engage customers with data-driven, personalized digital experiences is something that every company will be pursuing over the next few years. We believe Airkit is the leader in the low-code customer engagement market and we have full confidence in Stephen and his team’s ability to deliver real value to their customers.”
— Santi Subotovsky, General Partner, Emergence Capital
“After joining Salesforce through the acquisition of RelateIQ, Adam and I observed that the next frontier of competitive differentiation for leading brands would be through personalized digital experiences. The last mile of customer experience continues to be a challenge for every company — and as consumers, we’ve all experienced those pain points acutely. With Airkit, we set out to build a low-code solution purpose-built for customer engagement that would be as simple to use as Excel and as powerful as Salesforce.”
— Stephen Ehikian, CEO and co-founder of Airkit
“Consumers will increasingly demand better digital self-service, and companies clearly need an easier way to build end-to-end digital customer experiences. Stephen and Adam’s idea of a low-code platform for customer engagement was exactly what the market needs now more than ever. Not only does Airkit completely upend the slow and complex process of developing digital customer experiences, those customer experiences are more efficient, personalized and powerful than what was previously possible. We’ve seen customers whose projects have languished for years completed in a matter of weeks with Airkit. It’s a privilege to work once again with Stephen and Adam after our journey together at RelateIQ.”
— Steve Loughlin, Accel
“Airkit provided us with an automated and digital onboarding experience for our partners by integrating with Salesforce. We’ve been able to transition over 50% of new restaurants to fully automated onboarding, with over 80% completing at least some part of their onboarding in a touchless manner.”
— Steve Puchala, SVP of Restaurants at SkipTheDishes
