You just raised $22 million. What are you planning to use this capital for?
We recently raised a round of Series B funding – $22 million, led by K1 Capital, with participation from our existing investors – Kalaari Capital, Kae Capital, and AngelList.
This round of funding gives us all the ammunition we need to further build the customer service solution for businesses. We’re looking to double down on our product and growth.
E-mails have a massive problem of spam. How can this be managed? Does Hiver have solutions for this?
Let’s not forget that email continues to be very strong as a channel that businesses use to communicate with customers and partners. Email’s asynchronous nature, ubiquity, and structure makes it great for business communication.
Hiver is a customer service solution that works within Gmail, and one of its advantages is that it helps support teams streamline and organize their inbox. With features such as query delegation and workload management, agents have clarity on what they’re working on. Hiver also helps teams collaborate while overcoming the problem of inbox clutter that comes with CCs and forwards.
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Additionally, Hiver lets support teams set up customized automations. So, let’s say, you’re getting a lot of spammy newsletters into your support team inbox, you can create an automation that ensures these emails are filed away – ensuring a spam-free inbox.
What has customer adoption been like? How many customers do you have?
At present, we cater to over 1,500 companies across 30 countries (US, UK, Australia and Germany among others). Some of our customers include Harvard University, Canva, UpWork, Vacasa, Flexport, and Gong.
What new innovations do you plan to introduce this year, if any?
We know that while email continues to be a very important customer service channel for most businesses, a lot of organizations now increasingly use chat and social media to talk to their customers.
We’re now working on enabling communication through those channels, right from inside Gmail. These capabilities will be added to Hiver in 2022.
You are aiming at $100 million revenue in the next 4-5 years. This will be from organic growth of your current offering?
Yes. We’re going to go 10x on the product. We want to do this by including more customer communication channels and adding more powerful functionalities. We also want to create a bigger buzz around Hiver as a brand, by doing more innovative campaigns.
What was the impact of the pandemic on your business? How do you see growth now with businesses opening up?
Without a doubt, the pandemic impacted our business and also the way we work. One of Hiver’s core offerings is enabling team collaboration. That meant a lot of our customers – who had to go remote due to the pandemic – were able to overcome the collaboration challenges, manage workload efficiently, and keep track of what’s happening across their teams. With businesses now opening up, there are surely more opportunities.
