Hi everyone. Thank you to everyone who responded to my last two posts! As I mentioned, times are changing. Since publishing 009: Valuation, Beware, we’ve already seen many companies adapt to the changing playing field: Instacart cut it’s valuation in half, multiples have consolidated as Electric raised at 26x when they could have raised at 2-3x that valuation this time last year, and Gopuff laid off hundreds of workers.
Despite the calamitous nature of our markets, a few companies we’ve already dove into about have just raised money with strong underlying fundamentals: Ramp doubled its valuation to $8.1B, and Modern Treasury raised $50M from Salesforce. I will continue sharing strong high-growth companies to aid in your job search or journey to understanding startupland.
P.S. Another thing to make you skeptical of markets: Yield Curve inversion : )
As always, you can find the abbreviated list of companies we’ve already talked about here. Below are links to the previous posts
Software Spotlight: Asapp
Company Snapshot
Founded: 2014
Employees: 390+
Funding: $384M
Valuation: $1.6B
Stage: Series D
Locations: New York, Bozeman, London, San Francisco
Company Overview
Asapp is a contact center automation platform.
Tell Me More
Asapp is a machine learning platform for Customer Experience teams that transforms how companies engage with customers, scale digital channels and realize operational efficiencies. Founded in 2014 by Gustavo Sapoznik, Asapp's vision is to become the category leader in enterprise automation, building a portfolio of machine learning powered applications for the enterprise that address adjacent market opportunities with large economic scale, workflow inefficiencies, and massive amounts of data.
The company’s approach to enterprise automation leverages human intelligence by training its machine learning models based on the contact center’s best contact center representatives. The platform ingests a variety of unstructured and structured data from customer conversations, procedural documents, account information, metadata, and more. Since the platform is able to interpret and enrich this data, Use Cases are deployed to both end-customers and representatives to answer questions more efficiently via self service, real-time, or asynchronous communication. Asapp’s product-suite surfaces recommended actions in real-time and triggers workflows at key moments of customer impact.
Market Opportunity
Contact centers are everywhere. Whether it be a bank, airline, or insurance provider, there are real humans waiting on the other end of the phone, chat, or email to field your problem. In fact, Grandview Research expects the global contact center market to reach $24B, growing at 23% CAGR. As we talked about previously, what makes an exceptional, category-defining company is not conquering that first market, it’s expanding into an even larger market. Given Asapp’s platform play, the company aims to provide more than just contact center automation, it hopes to move into Customer Experience Management, providing a holistic view of the customer through its real-time data ingestion and data enrichment capabilities. Today, companies like ServiceNow and Twilio dominate the CEM market, valued at $96B, which is ~3.75x larger than the Contact Center market.
Likewise, the pandemic has driven a surge in activity in Asapp’s end markets. Call volumes are at historical highs, and automated cloud contact software is an imperative for future work from home environments. As a result, Asapp is well positioned to capitalize on attractive customer and market dynamics given contact center software is already a high ranking component amongst enterprise IT spend.
Lastly, as we noted with Ramp, customer savings can fuel tremendous growth for vendors. According to IBM, businesses can reduce their customer service spending up to 30% by introducing contact center automation, AI-powered chatbots, and virtual agents. Similarly, an analyst report from Juniper Research found that in 2022, businesses expected to save $8 billion in customer support costs — a jump from the $20 million saved from automation in 2017.
Why I like the company
Every management consultant has worked on a call center project and knows the inefficiencies associated with standing one up. From a technology perspective, the current infrastructure of call centers is stitched together through multiple legacy vendors' products, creating complicated data pathways and underlying plumbing that can be hard to maintain and update. Asapp is flipping the narrative through its horizontal cloud platform that enables representatives to work from anywhere and leverage the best insights.
Product aside, the company’s growth is fueled by a gaggle of Fortune 500 customers that have chosen Asapp as their preferred technology provider. Customers like Aetna, JetBlue, Dish, Sprint, Chase, Ernst & Young, American Airlines, and more have contributed to Asapp’s 8-figure revenue.
Lastly, Asapp claims to have the largest collection of Ph.D. students studying machine learning for customer experience with over 30+ Ph.D. 's employed on the technology team. The team has taken a different direction compared to many AI/ML companies in the sense that they are building “self-learning” models (not pre-trained) to solve challenges without rules-based programming. They are identifying opportunities to add micro-automations for real-time augmented customer support as well.