Fortino Capital leads $4 million seed round extension, joining Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI fund) and Partech
Amsterdam, the Netherlands – June 15, 2021 – Dutch startup Kaizo, announces the extension of its $4 million seed round led by Fortino Capital's Marcel Van der Heijden. In 2020, Kaizo raised $3 million in seed capital co-led by Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI fund) and Partech. The round was followed by the amazing Tom Keiser (CEO at Hootsuite), Peter Livingston (GP at Unpopular Ventures) with Chris Murphy, and Said Mia, Andy Funk et al (GP at Stormbreaker Ventures). Kaizo is headed by two experienced entrepreneurs, Christoph Auer-Welsbach, former Partner at IBM Ventures and Founding Director of the NPO City.AI, and Dominik Blattner, an entrepreneur with almost a decade of experience building scalable customer service applications.
With the COVID-induced increase in the digital consumer-market and implementation of remote/hybrid workforce models, customer support has never been more powerful towards a business’ success. Kaizo is helping organizations unlock the full extent of this power. Both to satisfy growing consumer demands by actively maintaining and improving employees’ efficiency and performance. Also, by creating interactive, digital work environments that help managers lead hybrid teams in today’s agile business environment.Christoph Auer-Welsbach, CEO at Kaizo
Kaizo provides a Workforce Performance Management (WPM) platform for the world's largest remote-working industry, customer support. It uses gamification, AI, and real-time analytics to proactively guide employees to more easily and efficiently achieve personal and company goals.
Kaizo is seamlessly and deeply integrated into the Zendesk platform, where it is the #1 WFM solution and in the top 10 of all applications on the Zendesk Marketplace. These accolades have helped them onboard over one thousand companies including the likes of Foot Locker, Axonius, and Marley Spoon.
Kaizo enables WPM on every level of a customer service department – from agent self-development to multi-team management. The platform empowers agents to take ownership of their performance improvement. With the guidance of a workflow-integrated avatar, agents can set and manage their own goals based on their team’s KPIs and are rewarded with skill points for their progress.
On a managerial level, Kaizo gives leaders the ability to efficiently guide their teams’ performance on a team and individual level. On top of the workflow-integrated reporting, capacity planning and QA tools, Kaizo provides detailed, real-time performance insights for managers. This allows them to easily pinpoint performance issues and utilize the point system to guide and incentivize their team to improve rapidly. Over time, this unified, in-game digital work environment increases agent’s engagement, retention and overall performance.
We’re excited to work with Christoph and Dominik to build the next generation cloud-based, data/AI enabled tools to help the 17M contact center agents out there be more successful in a > $350B market. The rate with which they are able to acquire customers is impressive and a great start.Marcel van der Heijden, Partner at Fortino Capital
With this new capital, Kaizo will focus on platform enhancement and broadening their customer base to empower more support teams to improve their performance. The company has some key roles in those areas to fill, whether at its headquarters in Amsterdam or remotely.
To try Kaizo or for more information please visit kaizo.com.
Kaizo is a Workforce Performance Management (WPM) platform leading the charge towards improving the performance of customer support teams around the globe. It leverages gamification and AI to improve operational efficiency and elevate teams' performance, proactively guiding employees towards better results. Its mission is to empower hybrid workforces to be more efficient, engaged and productive, so they can exceed their own performance expectations. For more information, please visit https://kaizo.com/about/.
Fortino Capital Partners is a leading venture capital and growth private equity firm investing in European software and technology companies with a focus on the Benelux, France and Germany. Its mission is to support ambitious founding and management teams in realising their growth plans. Fortino Capital invests in early growth (venture capital) and more mature companies (growth capital) for which organic growth is at the heart of their strategy. Fortino has offices in Belgium and the Netherlands. For more information, please visit www.fortinocapital.com
About Kaizo
Kaizo, the top-rated, unified, and actionable Workforce Performance Management (WPM) platform covering the entire customer support life-cycle.