Most startup founders have a hard road to their first spherical of funding, however the founders of Digital Brain had it a bit harder than most. The younger founders survived by getting into and triumphing hackathons to pay their lease and placed food on the table.
One of the thoughts they got here up with at the ones hackathons was DigitalBrain, a layer that sits on pinnacle of customer support software program like Zendesk to streamline obligations and simplicity the process of customer service agents.
They ended up in Y Combinator withinside the Summer 2020 class, and these days the business enterprise introduced a $three.four million seed investment. This general includes $three million raised this spherical, which closed in August, and formerly unannounced investments of $250,000 in March from Unshackled Ventures and $150,000 from Y Combinator in May.
The spherical was led through Moxxie Ventures, with assist from Caffeinated Capital, Unshackled Ventures, Shrug Capital, Weekend Fund, Underscore VC and Scribble Ventures, along side a slew of person investors.
Company co-founder Kesava Kirupa Dinakaran says that once he and his accomplice Dmitry Dolgopolov met at a hackathon in May 2019, they moved into a community residence in San Francisco complete of startup founders.
They stored listening to from their housemates approximately the troubles their businesses confronted with customer support as they started out scaling. Like any true entrepreneur, they determined to construct some thing to resolve that trouble.
“DigitalBrain is an outside layer that sits on pinnacle of existing assist desk software to clearly assist the aid retailers get via their tickets two times as fast, and we’re doing that through automating a variety of inner workflows, and giving them all of the context and facts they want to reply to each ticket, making the revel in of responding to those tickets substantially faster,” Dinakaran instructed TechCrunch.
What this indicates in exercise is that customer support reps paintings in DigitalBrain to manner their tickets, and as they stumble upon a trouble together with canceling an order or reporting a bug, in place of traversing numerous structures to restore it, they pick the best movement in DigitalBrain, enter the specified facts and the trouble is resolved for them automatically. In the case of a bug, it’d record a Jira ticket with engineering. In the case of canceling an order, it’d take all the moves and update all the statistics required through this request.
As Dinakaran factors out, they aren’t normal Silicon Valley startup founders. They are 20-year-vintage immigrants from India and Russia, respectively, who got here to the U.S. with coding talents and a dream of constructing a business enterprise. “We are each outsiders to Silicon Valley. We didn’t visit college. We don’t come from households of means. We desired to return back right here and construct our initial network from the floor up,” he stated.
Eventually they met a few oldsters via their housemates, who recommended that they practice to Y Combinator. “As we began out to meet people that we met via our community residence right here, a number of them have been YC founders and that they kept saying I assume you men will love the YC network, now no longer simply in phrases of your ethos, however also simply simply from a attitude of assembly new humans and wherein you are,” he stated.
He stated whilst he and his co-founder have hassle wrapping their arms around a range of like the amount they’ve in the bank now, thinking about it wasn’t that long ago that they have been struggling to meet expenses each month, they apprehend this cash buys them an possibility to assist begin building a extra substantial business enterprise.
“What we’re seeking to do is without a doubt boost up the improvement and constructing of what we’re doing. And we assume if we push the gas pedal with the assets we’ve gotten, we’ll be capable of boost up bringing on the following couple of customers, and begin onboarding a number of the larger companies we’re fascinated in,” he stated.
