If you’re looking to launch a company, your best bet is to seek help from a serial entrepreneur like Brad Birnbaum. His latest startup, Kustomer, is shaking up the customer experience industry — and it just raised $26 million to double down on its efforts.
Birnbaum, along with Kustomer co-founder Jeremy Suriel, will use the new investment to establish the CRM platform as “the next Salesforce.” Fitting, as the co-founders’ previous startup, Assistly, was acquired by Salesforce in 2011.
The idea for Kustomer came to the co-founders — who have a combined 40 years of experience in the customer support space — while discussing the need for a more robust, practical approach to organizing customer data.
Though technology has made it possible to pull data points from a number of different channels at any given time, many companies still rely on manual processes to review that information. Case in point: Customer service professionals often copy and paste email exchanges into a CRM system as a way to capture customer information.
“We realized the world needed a modern, customer-centric platform to build applications on top of,” said Birnbaum. “All of the current customer support products are over a decade old and are therefore ripe for reinvention.”
Read Complete Article