In this edition of Localogy’s Local Radar, we examine newly funded companies Ferovinum, Agency & Gladia
1. Ferovinum
One ongoing theme in this series is the importance of vertical focus. We continue to see SaaS startups emerge to address the problems that are unique to a given local commerce vertical – be it autos, home services, or hospitality. Sometimes the vertical focus is even tighter, zeroing in on a sub-vertical. That’s the case with the narrow but highly-lucrative wine industry. Ferovinum launched recently with $23.2 million in funding to provide wineries with a SaaS platform to optimize their cash flows, sales, and overall financial health. For example, the platform does things like track inventory and wine production cycles. It couples this process with selling downstream wine shipments to distributors and resellers (generally the next point in the wine supply chain). Automating this process has value because the wine industry operates on these long cycles of a given year of wine production (harvest, fermentation, bottling, distribution, etc.). If it isn’t deliberately optimized, wineries can see crippling cash flow and inventory issues, given the long cycle of ROI. This also helps distributors and resellers to plan, by seeing what’s in a given winery’s production pipeline and committing to downstream purchases. Meanwhile, the company is in early stages but already seeing traction with customers that include Scotland-based Holyrood Distillery and Port of Leith Distillery; and English wineries Ridgeview Wine Estate and Hundred Hills Winery.
2. Agency
Agency wants to automate the job of customer service managers (CSMs). These are the professionals at software companies that manage B2B service, onboarding, training, and other handholding. The company was founded by Elias Torres, former VP of engineering at HubSpot and founder of Drift, which sold to Vista Equity for $1.2 billion in 2021. And it just landed $12 million in seed funding, led by Sequoia and HubSpot Ventures. Back to the focus on CSMs, it’s the latest job role to be taken over by AI. And it makes sense, because it has attributes that make it primed for smart automation. It’s also a strong value proposition to SaaS companies because they can instill meaningful operational efficiencies and scale by automating the otherwise onerous CSM role. But before all the CSMs out there get nervous, the proposition that Agency is making is much like several other job roles that AI is proposed to optimize: it won’t replace humans but empower them. More specifically, Agency is meant to free up time in CSMs’ day by handling many of their rote tasks like scheduling, meeting prep, note-taking, follow-ups. We’ll see if that ends up being the case or if it’s just a PR line to avoid fear and backlash to the platform…
3. Gladia
Paris-based Gladia is using AI to automate and optimize audio transcription and analytics. In doing so, the company is addressing any enterprise functions that utilize audio. This is of course a popular and well-populated corner of the AI world, with several startups that automate things like call transcriptions (e.g., Otter). But the opportunity is likely large enough to support several players, and Gladia recently raised $16 million ($20.3 million to date) to jump into the competitive landscape. Furthermore, the company is looking to differentiate itself in this crowded field by specializing in audio content that falls outside of the English Language and English accents. This makes sense for a company based in France, given the language’s nuanced inflections. Altogether it claims to be proficient in advanced real-time transcription for more than 100 languages, and many dialects and accents. Beyond transcription, it also can extract insights in seconds, including caller mood, sentiment, and call summaries. The company is also lowering barriers to adoption by offering its full-fledged platform, as well as APIs that bring the functionality to popular enterprise software. And is seeing decent traction already with 600 enterprise customers and about 70,000 end users. Its next conquest, now that it has fresh funding in hand: call centers.
