Uruguayan machine learning company MonkeyLearn already has one foot inside Silicon Valley. After spending a period of three months in the Californian area in search of expanding its business, it achieved what many long for, but few get: local investment.
The process of raising that capital - which is still ongoing - was not easy for MonkeyLearn co-founders Raúl Garreta and Federico Pascual, who had to meet with more than 100 investors to achieve their goal. But their perseverance paid off as they raised US$600,000 in exchange for a 10% stake in the company, the directors confirmed. The fundraising remains open until January, so this sum is likely to grow.
The minimum target (US$ 500,000) has already been surpassed and the goal is to reach US$ 1 million. If this is not reached in the first month of 2017, they will end the investment round to focus on improving the product.
"Fundraising is important for a company when it comes to injecting resources, but sometimes it is confused with a measure of success. It has to end, and then we can focus on what is important, which is the company," Garreta stressed.
The capital will be used to expand the eight-person team by 50% and to scale the company. In fact, one of the first steps they will take in their Montevideo offices is to move to a flat of their own in the building where they currently work together with their parent company, Tryolabs, which specialises in software development with artificial intelligence components. They have also chosen the Galvanize coworking space in San Francisco to settle in during the periods they live in California.
The entrepreneurs explained that they participated together in attracting investment, because it is an exciting but exhausting process. "We worked our heads off, because it's not easy to get a continuous 'no' and then wake up the next day and make the same pitch you made the day before. It's important to work as a team," said Pascual.
Accelerating the process
One of MonkeyLearn's most frequent use cases is the analysis of customer service interactions. Companies that serve consumers receive large volumes of complaints via email, chat or other text-based channels. MonkeyLearn's natural language processing technology makes it possible to analyse these interactions, learn from historical data and automate part of the response process. This makes customer service centre managers more efficient and faster in their service delivery.
Along these lines, they contacted the multinational customer service software company Zendesk, which works with the music streaming app Spotify, among the 70,000 companies worldwide that use its software.
The company was keen to integrate MonkeyLearn's technology into its product. "There is an unmet need that we can fill," Pascual said.
From a business line to a startup
The Uruguayan Silicon Valley-based company Tryolabs, which specialises in internet products with artificial intelligence components, created MonkeyLearn as a new line of business in late 2013. The potential and growth of this unit caused it to quickly spin off as a spin-off from a previous company. In 2015, MonkeyLearn participated in the acceleration of the prestigious 500 startup. Today it has more than 50 corporate clients who use the services on a paid basis and 12,000 users from all over the world use the free plan. Its main market is the US, followed by India and Europe.
Source: El País
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