Affogata, which helps brands manage their online reputation, raises $5.5M

Customer intelligence platform Affogata today announced it has raised $5.5 million in series A funding co-led by Mangrove Capital Partners and PICO Venture Partners. Cofounder Sharel Omer said the funds will enable Affogata to invest in its tooling, strengthen its online presence, and support its customer service initiatives.

No matter how exceptional a company’s customer service, meeting expectations is a challenge. According to American Express, the U.S. consumers’ board report shows more people talk about poor service than good experiences.

How it works

Affogata, which was founded in 2019 by Omer, Ran Margaliot, and Itamar Rogel, offers AI-driven technology that provides clients with data related to their brand and competitors from forums, the web, and internal data sources. The platform lets stakeholders — including marketers, product managers, customer success teams, and data analysts — derive insights based on this data, enabling proactive actions to ostensibly ensure better customer experiences.

The company surfaces what customers are searching for across various channels to provide a picture of preferences and trends, offering the ability to perform customer segmentation with automated competitor keyword and sentiment tracking. Affogata clients can receive alerts about sentiment changes and connect and engage with customers through the aforementioned channels. And they can keep track of reviews while controlling their messaging by removing bots and spammers with automated, AI-powered moderation.

For example, Affogata can highlight mentions of a company name in app store reviews, on Twitter and Facebook, in online communities such as Discord, and from internal systems like Zendesk and Wix Answers. Users can funnel these mentions into customized reports and dashboards or export the data for further analysis and ingestion by analytics and business intelligence systems.

“The unique challenge faced by our platform is how to fuse data from structured, unstructured, and half-structured sources, coming from sources as diverse as support conversation, reviews, surveys, social media posts, and more,” Omer told VentureBeat via email. “This means we had to build a proprietary analysis pipeline, leveraging a broad set of AI approaches that we developed in-house, which is able to look at very different ‘signals’ from a vast array of sources. After those signals are taken into account, we then come up with a sensible, unified view of what customers care about, what warrants attention, and what is relevant to which stakeholder, and what requires immediate action.”

Ability to respond

Omer believes that there’s a vital need for brands like Wix, eToro, MyHeritage, Playtika, and Lemonade, which Affogata counts among its customers, to gain visibility and take action regarding sentiment. A company’s ability to implement customer feedback, monitor, and respond to online communities is increasingly a determinant in their success or failure, he claims.

“Our technology shines when customers integrate it as a key part of their ops. For example, gaming companies have really short feedback loops — for example, overly aggressive game mechanics are introduced, leading to immediate churn and user complaints about ‘pay to play,’” Omer said. “Our tool helps them get instant feedback and adapt their games accordingly, reducing churn and increasing engagement, both directly contributing to their bottom-line revenues.”

One study found that nearly 3 out of 4 consumers trust a company to a greater degree if the reviews for that company are positive. And according to research from Reputation X, consumers read an average of seven reviews before trusting a business.

“The criteria for the insights we produce is whether they’re actionable. Our insights are relevant for customer success, product managers, marketing, developers, executives, crisis managers, security, and more,” Omer said. “That cross-organizational relevancy enables strategic initiatives that involve multiple teams at the company, giving them the power to utilize customer insights to execute and adjust initiatives.”

Wix Capital and Fiverr Founder and CEO Micha Kaufman also participated in Affogata’s funding round — its first. the Tel Aviv, Israel-based company currently has 25 employees.

Updated at 7:35 a.m. Pacific: This article has been updated to note that the funding round totaled $5.5 million, not $5 million, as was earlier reported. We regret the error.

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