Airkit Launches with $28 Million in Funding to Fix the Last Mile of Digital Customer Experience for Leading Brands

Airkit, the world’s first Low-Code Platform for Customer Engagement, announced general availability of its solution for building customer experiences with $28M in funding from Accel, Emergence Capital, and Salesforce Ventures. Airkit CEO Stephen Ehikian and CTO Adam Evans were previously the COO and CTO/co-founder, respectively, of RelateIQ, a relationship intelligence company acquired by Salesforce.com in 2014. Airkit already counts SkipTheDishes, Turo, Agero, EZR, a Fortune 500 Insurance Company and a Fortune 1000 Bank among early customers who have deployed digital customer experiences on its platform.

Companies are focused on customer experience because buyers increasingly favor brands with hyper-personalized, end-to-end, digital self-service, that meets them where they are. According to a recent study by American Express, over 60% of US consumers prefer automated self-service, such as a website or mobile app, for simple customer service tasks, and consumer preference for mobile customer service has grown by 71% since 2014¹.

With COVID-19, the demand for effective, touchless, self-service options has only increased across all industries, and many companies have struggled to scale and improve their offerings. According to research firm IDC, the total market for Customer Experience Technology is estimated at $641b in 2022. The challenge for most companies is the limited availability of developers and the slow and complex process of building even basic digital customer experiences.

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With the industry’s first low-code platform purpose-built for customer engagement, Airkit enables any team to quickly and reliably build hyper-personalized, end-to-end customer journeys that are powered by existing systems. The result is a new level of agility and innovation in customer experience for any company, whether they are digital-first technology companies or established brands.

“The opportunity to truly engage customers with data-driven, personalized digital experiences is something that every company will be pursuing over the next few years,” said Santi Subotovsky, General Partner, Emergence Capital. “We believe Airkit is the leader in the low-code customer engagement market and we have full confidence in Stephen and his team’s ability to deliver real value to their customers.”

For developers or non-developers, Airkit’s low-code platform simplifies the three main challenges to building great customer experiences:

• Integrate data silos to power personalized experiences;
• Build end-to-end digital flows for any customer need;
• Orchestrate compelling interactions that span any channel.

Furthermore, Airkit delivers industry-leading levels of security, compliance (SOC 2, PCI, HIPAA, GDPR, CCPA), availability, and scalability specifically for customer-facing applications that general-purpose low-code platforms lack.

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“After joining Salesforce through the acquisition of RelateIQ, Adam and I observed that the next frontier of competitive differentiation for leading brands would be through personalized digital experiences. The last mile of customer experience continues to be a challenge for every company — and as consumers, we’ve all experienced those pain points acutely,” said Stephen Ehikian, CEO and co-founder of Airkit. “With Airkit, we set out to build a low-code solution purpose-built for customer engagement that would be as simple to use as Excel and as powerful as Salesforce.”

Airkit delivers a low-code platform that enables businesses to streamline and empower the customer experience (CX) while significantly decreasing time to market. With Airkit, business users or developers can assemble prebuilt templates, data objects, and integrations into powerful customer journeys in a matter of days versus months across phone, SMS, web, chat and other channels; boosting both customer engagement and employee productivity.

Airkit’s suite of restful APIs allows users to create out-of-the-box integrations for hyper-personalized, end-to-end interactions quickly, for every customer need. Airkit was purpose-built for instantaneous, transient customer experiences and integrates with native platforms such as Salesforce, Zendesk, Microsoft, Looker, SAP, Twilio, Stripe, Marketo, and many others to empower businesses to fully leverage each customer touch point.

“Consumers will increasingly demand better digital self-service, and companies clearly need an easier way to build end-to-end digital customer experiences. Stephen and Adam’s idea of a low-code platform for customer engagement was exactly what the market needs now more than ever,” says Steve Loughlin, Accel. “Not only does Airkit completely upend the slow and complex process of developing digital customer experiences, those customer experiences are more efficient, personalized and powerful than what was previously possible. We’ve seen customers whose projects have languished for years completed in a matter of weeks with Airkit. It’s a privilege to work once again with Stephen and Adam after our journey together at RelateIQ.”

“Airkit provided us with an automated and digital onboarding experience for our partners by integrating with Salesforce,” said Steve Puchala, SVP of Restaurants at SkipTheDishes. “We’ve been able to transition over 50% of new restaurants to fully automated onboarding, with over 80% completing at least some part of their onboarding in a touchless manner.”

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