In this edition of Localogy’s Local Radar, we examine newly funded companies Numa, Dinii, and AirDoctor
1. Numa
A local vertical approach can be limiting, but not when it’s a huge vertical like autos. Founded in 2017, Numa recently landed a $32 million Series B round to bring conversational commerce to auto dealers. Specifically, it takes an AI-first approach to automate customer service. Like many well-placed AI endeavors, the idea is to reduce headaches for local businesses and help them scale their own time/productivity by automating parts of their day. Beyond headaches, it’s a matter of effectiveness, as Numa reports that a third of car dealers miss at least a fifth of their incoming calls. That’s where Numa’s technology steps in to be a first line of defense to incoming customer queries. This involves things like “rescuing” missed calls and helping to book service appointments. It can also give customers status updates on upcoming appointments, service underway, or other common asks. Another example is automatically collecting car information to facilitate trade-ins – often a manual process. Back to the vertical focus, Numa believes that car dealer dynamics are nuanced enough for a dedicated product. And the size of the vertical, again, makes that focus potentially pay off. And it’s off to a good start with 600 dealers using the software.
2. Dinii
Speaking of large verticals with specific/nuanced operational needs, restaurants also possess those attributes. That’s why we see several local SaaS players address the vertical directly (think: OpenTable). Somewhere in that mix is Dinii, which lets customers order food through its mobile platform. The company, based in Japan, recently raised $48 million. It started as a restaurant management software layer that differentiated by not requiring specific hardware (Think: Clover terminals). It let restaurants simply use whatever devices they already had. Starting as a cloud-based POS platform, it has since expanded into adjacent restaurant functions to be a more holistic operational management suite. That includes employee management, reservations, and deliveries. This progression was inspired by Toast, but the company wanted to bring that model to Japan and adapt it to the region’s culture and unique market dynamics. In fact, one of its investors, Bessemer, is also invested in Toast. Dinii already has more than 20 million registered diners making food orders across over 3,000 restaurants.
3. AirDoctor
Continuing on the verticals theme, another big one is professional services, especially healthcare… doctors, dentists, etc.. AirDoctor goes even more narrow. It focuses on helping individuals find the appropriate healthcare provider when they’re traveling abroad. This anxious use case often presents challenges like finding a doctor who speaks your language, is in your provider network, and other system-specific know-how (how do emergency rooms work in Europe versus Asia?). The company last week raised $20 million in Series B funding to continue this mission and to further build out the product. That product so far includes some directory components as a knowledge base for referring travelers to the right doctors in any given situation. Think of this like a database with an extensive taxonomy of tags and other attributes like healthcare specialty, doctor profiles, etc. As you might imagine this is a free app for consumers, while AirDoctor makes money by interfacing with your insurance provider and managing doctors’ payments/reimbursements, while taking a small management fee. That fee is often welcome given the the headaches it alleviates. For example, it says that its work results in 50 percent savings on outpatient claims, 60 percent savings for healthcare providers, and lessens the normally-lengthy processing time by 75 percent. AirDoctor currently claims 80,000 customers, and a database of 20,000 doctors across 84 countries.
