Estonia’s Klaus raises $5.4 million to boost human-to-human customer relations

Estonian startup Klaus — which is built on the premise that while chatbots and AI-solutions will take over many of the mundane, transactional customer service interactions, the value, and importance of the remaining human-to-human conversations will in fact increase — unveiled a $5.4 million funding round led by Global Founders Capital whose portfolio also includes Slack, Revolut, and DeliveryHero.

Klaus said the funding will be used to develop new functionality aimed at the enterprise segment while maintaining a competitive edge in user experience.

“There is a universe of relationship-driven conversations, which neither side wants automated and we are precisely focused on improving the quality of those,” say co-founders Kair Käsper and Martin Kõiva.

According to Kõiva and Käsper, the best way to improve the quality of customer service and overall customer experience is to give every service agent lots of systematic feedback internally on their conversations with customers. Klaus is a SaaS platform for doing just that.

“Feedback is easy if you have five people on the support team, but incredibly time-consuming and complicated if you need to give feedback to 1,500 agents on a weekly basis,” said Kõiva who experienced the problem firsthand, running a large support team at another SaaS company Pipedrive.

Klaus connects with 17 modern help desk software like Intercom, Zendesk, and Salesforce Service Cloud, providing dozens of specialized features for giving internal feedback at scale to hundreds or thousands of service agents. Conceptually, conversation review is akin to code review in engineering. Reviewers and managers gain insight into what is being said and find ways to improve the overall quality of conversations.

“Customer success and support is increasingly becoming a key differentiator in today’s market across many industries and company categories. The use of modern helpdesk tools is at the same time proliferating,” said Global Founders Capital partner Philippe Klintefelt Collet.

Founded in 2018 in Tallinn, Klaus has previously raised money from Creandum of Sweden, Finnish VC Icebreaker, and several angel investors, among them founders of companies like Pipedrive, Outfunnel, Lift99, Eventornado, and Beetroot.