Participated · Seed · Dec 2016

Paystack provides an online payments API that lets merchants integrate payments with a few lines of code. The company is active in Nigeria, integrating with tens of thousands of businesses and claiming to process 15% of all online payments in the country. Its platform supports payment cards, bank transfers, mobile money and USSD by working with major banks and mobile carriers to handle fragmented local payment methods. Paystack processes over $20 million monthly and typically takes about 1.5% per transaction. The founders are Shola Akinlade (CEO) and Ezra Olubi (CTO), and Paystack was the first Nigerian startup to enter Y Combinator. The company plans to continue growing in Nigeria and to expand to other African countries, starting with Ghana. Paystack provides an online payments platform that connects multi-channel payment options with merchants across Nigeria, enabling acceptance of credit cards, debit cards and direct bank transfers on web and mobile. Led by co-founders Shola Akinlade and Ezra Olubi, the company has partnered with Nigerian internet companies including iROKOtv, Jobberman, Payporte and Hotels.ng. Now moving out of beta, Paystack has built a developer community of more than 30 independent developers building plug-ins and tools using its REST APIs and client libraries. The company intends to use the $1.3M seed funding to build out its engineering team in Lagos, grow sales and marketing operations, and accelerate product development and customer onboarding. Paystack is a Y Combinator alumnus and currently runs operations from Sunnyvale and Lagos, Nigeria.

Participated · Seed · Apr 2016

DigitalGenius builds machine-learning and natural-language-processing software that analyzes historical text and email interactions to create a lexicon of common customer-service interactions and generate suggested responses. The product is designed to work alongside human agents, autonomously handling interactions up to a point or offering suggested replies for CSRs to edit before sending. The company has expanded its customer base rapidly, growing from two customers last year to 30 this year, and counts KLM, Unilever, Eurostar and Soylent among customers; it also landed its first government customer this year. DigitalGenius has offices in the US and London and plans to use new capital to continue international expansion. Management has hired a chief revenue officer and intends to grow headcount from about 60 by roughly 30–50% over the coming year, depending on continued growth. The company cited market timing as a factor in adoption as AI and ML became more commonplace since its 2015 Disrupt appearance. DigitalGenius sells a Human+AI Customer Service Platform that links to popular customer service systems such as Salesforce, Zendesk and Oracle to recommend or automate responses. The platform analyzes service logs from chats, social interactions and emails to learn common transactions and surface the most likely responses, using a configurable "confidence threshold" to decide when to automate versus route to a human CSR. After about a year of product iteration the company says it has reduced system training from several months to several weeks, though deployments typically still require assistance from a DigitalGenius engineer or an external systems integrator. The company pivoted from an earlier SMS-focused automated response product to a customer-service–focused solution last year. Management can monitor interactions via an administrative dashboard to maintain oversight of automated and human responses. Financially, DigitalGenius announced a new $4.1M funding round and says total financing to date is over $7M; the company has offices in New York and London and employs approximately 20 people, mostly engineers. DigitalGenius offers an automated customer-service platform using AI and natural language processing to carry on human-like SMS conversations and move users through a sales funnel. The product has attracted early customers including BMW and Unilever. Before this round the company had bootstrapped to a 20-person team and recorded customers and revenue, and it previously took a $250,000 convertible note. The company has offices in London and New York City and plans to add about 10 employees in the next year, with roughly 80% of hires focused on engineering. Management intends to use the new funding to hire talent and further productize the offering, and is seeking investor guidance on scaling and hiring.