Wise.io Raises $2.5 Million to Bring Machine Learning to $20 Billion Customer Experience Market

BERKELEY, CA--(Marketwired - Mar 17, 2014) -  Wise.io® today announced that it has raised $2.5 million in Series A funding led by Voyager Capital and named predictive analytics technology industry veteran Jeff Erhardt as CEO. Company co-founder Joshua Bloom will assume a new role as CTO leading the technology direction for Wise.io.

"Machine Learning is unquestionably the future of advanced analytics for the enterprise. When I first met Wise.io, I was struck by the caliber of the team and the unequaled performance of their core technology," said Daniel Ahn, managing director at Voyager Capital who joined the Wise.io board as part of the transaction. "Ultimately, what distinguished Wise.io from the other vendors and compelled us to invest was their focus on providing a complete turnkey product that was easily accessible to business users."

According to technology industry research firm Gartner (Gartner Forecast: Enterprise Software Markets, Worldwide, 2012-2017, 2Q13 Update), the customer experience market will be a $20.6 billion industry this year, almost doubling to a $36 billion market in 2017. Despite this explosive growth and the recognized need for customer-facing business processes to become more data-driven, there remains a substantial shortfall in the ability to implement the tools capable of deriving deep and actionable insights.

In developing its breakthrough machine-learning technology, Wise.io identified the need to provide more than just a high-performance toolkit targeted at expert users. In addition to being highly scalable, the Wise.io technology is easy to implement and provides unrivaled insights into the value hidden within data. 

"Customer experience management needs to view the entire customer lifecycle through a data-driven lens," said Erhardt, who most recently served as chief operating officer at Revolution Analytics. "Leveraging the data that companies already collect, our machine learning applications for CX generate greater value than conventional solutions. More importantly, they can be quickly implemented and easily interpreted by business decision makers."

Wise.io was founded in 2012 by some of the world's leading experts in astrophysics, statistics, computer science, and machine learning. Working together for over a decade, the team created automated machine-learning frameworks that were used to discover and understand some of the rarest phenomena in the universe, from peculiar stars to exploding white dwarfs. The company has more than a dozen production customers that range from Fortune 500 enterprises to innovative startups.

"Poor customer experience during the support process is a major cause of direct costs and lost revenue for nearly every company," said Mike Stringer, Group Director, Data Science at Citrix. "Advanced Analytics on Big Data should be part of every service organization's repertoire; however, the barriers to entry have historically been prohibitively high. The ability to rapidly implement high-performance machine learning applications with Wise.io's technology has the potential to radically improve the business of customer support."

"As a rapidly growing company, we faced the challenge of being overwhelmed by our volume of sales leads. Ultimately, we could not add staff quickly enough to continue manually evaluating and prioritizing our opportunities," said Adam Breckler, Co-founder and Vice President of Products at Visual.ly. "Without requiring any technical resources, we integrated Wise.io's intelligent lead scoring application with our Pardot marketing automation system, and immediately achieved greater efficiency, improved management visibility, and higher conversions."

About Wise.io
Wise.io provides applications spanning the entire customer lifecycle that apply the power of machine learning to help companies optimize how they acquire, monetize, and retain customers. The company was founded by leading experts in astrophysics, statistics, computer science, and machine learning as well as business executives who built innovative and disruptive businesses that brought advanced analytics to the enterprise software market. Wise.io's solutions are running in production at companies that range from Silicon Valley startups to the largest Fortune 500 corporations. Wise.io is based in Berkeley, California and backed by Voyager Capital.