Msg.ai

Overview

Msg.ai is an early stage startup that offers a SaaS machine learning product for companies to interact with their customers across all channels including SMS, social media, email, etc.  Basically they offer AI in a box targeting real time online customer service across social media and messaging channels.  When the conversation gets to complex for the AI, the system automatically hands it off to a human agent.  Their product works across a wide range of industries including CPG, eCommerce, online retail, etc.

Founded in October 2014, the company is based in San Francisco.  The founder, Puneet Mehta, is a former Wall Street IT leader and IBM engineer.

Why I like Them

Vertically focused specific use cases like this are where I think the interesting applications are of AI over the next 3-6 years.  Startups that find a way to use AI to automate specific human (aka expensive) processes such as digital customer service are interesting.  It's a relatively easy sell when you can show in a few months the savings dropping straight to a company's bottom line and management can reduce headcount in costs centers.

Even more interesting with Msg.ai is the access to their clients' unique proprietary datasets.  Years of one of a kind records of customer service exchanges in the past are datasets no one else in the industry has access to.  As I bring up time and time again on this blog,  with machine learning its less about the algorithms themselves and more about the proprietary data access they can train the models on that no one else can.

Msg.ai has had strong out of the gate success having already signed Sony and Heinz.  Sony reported in the first 3 months it was able to replace 70 human customer service staff due to Msg.ai technology while making their customer support responses faster.

Disclosure:  All information is from publicly available sources, I have not had any contact with a member of the company or its investors.