Netomi

Netomi, the provider of customer-service chatbots, has raised $30 million in a Series B funding round to be allocated for increased research and development on artificial intelligence (AI), the company’s principal area of expertise.

Netomi works in an area known as conversational AI, which aims to use natural language processing (NLP) to help chatbots and virtual assistants handle complex requests, while sounding as human-like as possible. The chatbots automate customer service conversations in email, messaging, and virtual assistants.

To date, Netomi has built an operating system that uses AI in three ways. It can help answer common customer questions, gather information about customer problems before sending users to customer service agents, and quickly identify situations when customers need assistance from a human agent.

Based in San Mateo, California, with additional offices in New York City and Gurugram, India, the company also plans to use the fresh capital infusion to open workplaces in London, Singapore, Toronto, and Montreal.

The latest funding round boosts the company’s value to $210 million, up from a valuation in 2019 of $67.5 million. New investors include WndrCo LLC, a technology and media investment firm co-founded by Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg. Existing investors that participated in the round include Eldridge Industries LLC and Fin Venture Capital.

Mixpanel

Mixpanel, the business analytics software developer that tracks user interactions with web and mobile apps, has secured $200 million in Series C funding from Bain Capital Tech Opportunities, raising the company’s valuation to $1.1 billion.

The new investment makes San Francisco-based Mixpanel a “unicorn,” or a startup valued at more than $1 billion. To date, $277 million has been invested in Mixpanel, including its previous $65 million Series B investment in 2014 led by Andreessen Horowitz. 

The latest investment will be used to accelerate product development and expand the company’s reach to include new digital-first businesses, Mixpanel executives say. The company plans to scale its team in North America, EMEA, and Asia Pacific in the next 12 to 18 months, focusing on the go-to-market, product, and engineering fields.

Mixpanel’s area of expertise, the product analytics market, centers on providing data for measuring user experience, achieved through business intelligence (BI) software that assesses how users interact with digital products like web and mobile applications. By tracking user behavior within products, the usage data can uncover insights that help organizations improve the product experience and propel business outcomes. 

Judo

Judo, the mobile experiences platform company, was the recent recipient of $3 million in seed funding. Los Angeles-based TenOneTen Ventures and San Francisco-headquartered Freestyle Capital, both early-stage venture capital firms, co-led the funding.

A software as a service (SaaS) platform, Judo is used by brands to build in-app experiences to engage mobile users throughout the customer journey. Brands can typically save 20 to 80 hours of development time in building experiences by using Judo’s no-code development environment. Experiences are added without requiring app updates through the use of a server-driven user interface (UI), an emerging technology used by major mobile-first enterprises, where layout and content alike are stored and updated on the server.

The Judo platform also allows marketing teams to integrate native in-app content as part of customer engagement without requiring app updates or developer resources. With an established presence in professional sports, Judo has begun working in other verticals, including over-the-top (OTT) media, sports gambling, consumer fintech, and retail. The platform is normally deployed on use cases characterized by a high return on investment (ROI), such as building onboarding, branded content and sponsorships, user conversion flows, and event-based content.