Contact centre responses startup raises $5 million Seed round

A Melbourne startup hoping to improve the customer experience for people dealing with contact centres has raised $5 million

US VC firm Bonfire Ventures led the round into Operative Intelligence, with additional funds from Wonder Ventures. The funds will be used to expand staffing and scale its customer intelligence product capabilities.

The company, founded in 2019, has bootstrapped until now, expanding into the US as well as Australia. .

Founders Peter and James Iansek describe their AI-based software as “Demand-Insights-as-a-Service”, designed to help call centre operators overcome often mismatched perceptions about why customers contact them and identify the real reason, reducing wait times and resolution success.

Peter Iansek, the startup’s CEO, said the investment will assist their rapid growth projections.

“We’re proud to have bootstrapped the company from an idea to an end-to-end production stack, serving customers globally since day one,” he said.

Sibling and chief production officer ames Iansek said there’s more than $49 billion in waste in customer service waste annually in the US.

“I had a hypothesis we could leverage machines and software to unlock the insight needed to fill the gap for businesses and Pete knew what it took to get a startup off the ground; we both knew we had to give it a go,” he said.

Bonfire Ventures MD Mark Mullen said Operative Intelliegence is modernising contact centres and has made “impressive strides” with its enterprise customers.

“James and Peter have built an intuitive solution to improve the customer experience at a time where needs are heightened,” he said.

“We look forward to their next moves to utilise AI technology to reshape an untapped space.”