Involve.ai | Bonfire Ventures

involve.ai creates an early warning dashboard to help customer teams with actionable insights and automation to prevent churn, increase upsells, and improve customer experience.

Why solve this problem?

We lived the problem we are solving in a huge way. We initially launched an employee volunteering platform in 2016 and churn became an issue for us as we were losing customers at a 20% MoM clip. We then built a simple version of a customer intelligence platform to diagnose why. It unified key indicators and communication signals from our Salesforce, Snowflake, Zendesk, JIRA, etc. We applied python algorithms to these signals to predict top churn risks, revenue expansion opportunities, and key customer facing actions. The product worked well and helped us survive through COVID where the value of each customer was critical. We offered our internal platform to 4 companies to try, and they were huge fans. One even reduced churn by 16% and added $400K in expansion revenue in just two months. That was our “aha!” moment. In 2020, we formally pivoted and launched involve.ai. Our vision is to make the world customer-centric.

Hardest thing about being a founder?

I grew up extremely poor in the suburbs of New Delhi, India in a single parent family (my father passed when I was 2) where my mom had to work extremely hard to support us. Growing up so poor always makes me question my decisions and I battle with imposter syndrome regularly. You just have to acknowledge it and keep going.

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Biggest piece of advice for aspiring founders?

Customer interviews. Spend time doing 20-40 customer interviews to validate your hypothesis around the pain, value proposition, differentiation, pricing, etc. We spent a lot of time talking to 44+ VPs of Customer Experience/ Chief Customer Officers to accelerate our learnings.

Most exciting moment so far?

We are proud and grateful to see involve.ai grow from an internal tool to closing $16M Series A led by Sapphire Ventures. We know we are on the right track. It has been a crazy journey for the entire involve.ai team, and the best part? This is just the beginning.

Why did you choose Bonfire?

I think a short story would be best to describe why I chose Bonfire. One year ago with COVID, our company was not doing well. I made a phone call to Mark Mullen, who is on our board. I had just had a terrible call with our team where we didn’t seem to have a clear path forward with the current product. I called Mark, and I told him what the team was thinking and what our options were. We wanted to pivot, and Mark replied, “Bonfire backed you, not your idea.” He then went on to make 4 essential intros that helped us successfully launch involve.ai. One to our head of Sales, two key customer accounts, and one to our Series A VC.

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What’s it like to work with Bonfire?

Bonfire is very reliable and always gives sound advice. It feels like the perfect partnership. Bonfire partners have been actively involved in finding and interviewing top talent. When we lost a top customer, Mark was our first call. When we were raising our Series A and getting term sheets, Mark was also our first call. We owe all our success to Bonfire’s partnership with involve.ai.

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Favorite book, useful tool or app?

Books on industry icons and historic figures helped shape me into the leader I am today. I draw inspiration from the minds of Benjamin Franklin, Isaac Newton, Elon Musk, and Steve Jobs - just to name a few.

In the News

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Other

Mary Poppen Joins involve

March 20, 2022

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Patent Announcement

March 20, 2022

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Series A funding

March 20, 2022

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