Mavenoid, a Swedish company that provides human and AI-enabled support and troubleshooting tools for hardware companies, has raised $30 million in Series B funding.
In the year Founded in Stockholm in 2017, Mavenoid works with hardware and consumer electronics companies including HP, Husqvarna and Jabra, automating technical support and outsourcing to customers everything from printers and ovens to electric scooters and industrial equipment.
Providing technical support for physical products comes with many unique problems – problems that cannot be solved by screen sharing or other solutions from the software sphere.
Typically, someone who encounters a problem with a new dishwasher or coffee maker, for example, would have to return the product to the store where they bought it, or the company would have to send a field service agent to physically inspect the product – but Mavenoid adopts a dual AI-driven self-service approach and agent-assisted live video support to avoid these costs.
“The way you solve physical product issues and the tools you need to be successful are very different from how you solve software or service issues,” says Mavenoid Founder and CEO. Shahan Lilja explained to TechCrunch. “We believe it’s better to have the right tools for the job than to try to use generic solutions to specific problems. Hardware issues are frequent, difficult and time-consuming to fix. By automating a significant portion of these frequent – but often complex – support requests, companies can save costs by reducing overhead and reallocating other resources across the organization.
Technical assistance
Along with live support, Mavenoid provides companies with interactive video tools, through which a customer interacts directly with a human agent.
Mavenoid: One-click video
The agent asks the customer to point the smartphone camera at the product, and the agent zooms in on the screen to show which part needs fixing and shares instructions on how to fix the problem.
Mavenoid: showing adjustments
Through AI-driven self-service, on the other hand, Mavenoid helps companies easily access and query their technical documentation, FAQs, and how-to guides through a chatbot-style interface.
Mavenoid Chatbot
To do this, Mavenoid combines Open AI’s GPT-3 language model and proprietary algorithms to create what it calls “high-quality support models.”
This basically means that Mavenoid takes care of all content scraping (docs, manuals, FAQs, etc.) and optimizes the knowledge base structure specifically for automated hardware support. It’s designed for more complex questions that traditional bot-builders might struggle with and follows a non-linear model that considers the unique aspects of the problem using Natural Language Understanding (NLU) to identify the real intent behind a user’s support request.
In short, Mavenoid promises to actually understand a query rather than simply searching and matching keywords. This increases the chances of getting a solution to the problem rather than avoiding questions and complaints from customer support teams.
“Retreats often mean customers don’t get the help they need and come back angrier than before – ultimately costing companies in the long run, because they still have to respond to the request, but they also hurt customer satisfaction and loyalty,” Lilia said.
It’s worth noting that at the end of a human-led live support session, agents can suggest suggestions that can be incorporated into Mavenoid’s machine learning models to improve the self-service product in the future.
“Over time, Mavenoid’s AI will learn from suggestions applied to improve the self-service assistant’s automation capabilities, as it does with all conversations.” Lilja added.
In terms of deployment, companies can embed the Mavenoid engine into any website or application by copying and pasting a shortcode. Then, they can publish links to their product assistants via email, customer support tickets, social networks, and even QR codes – for example, a company places a QR code sticker on a product, which directs a customer to self-service setup. Instruction.
Mavenoid can integrate with customer relationship management (CRM) software, ticketing systems, ecommerce stores, knowledge bases, and more.
Everything changes.
Since Mavenoid’s $8 million launch two years ago, with a new interface and tons of new features like AI Retrieval, it allows companies to turn their product documents into indexable and searchable snippets of relevant answers. Through Mavenoid’s self-service product assistant – it’s a little bit about how to answer certain questions directly in the search results on the Google page.
Mavenoid: AI retrieval
On top of that, Mavenoid has expanded to more than 50 languages and introduced several third-party integrations, including with Salesforce, Zendesk, Shopify, Zapier, and more.
Mavenoid has previously raised about $10 million, and with another $30 million in the bank, the company says it plans to double down on its AI and product development, as well as scale the technology globally.
Mavenoid’s Series B round was led by Smedvig Capital, with participation from Crendem, Mosaic, Point Nine Capital, NordicNinja and ABB Technology Ventures.
