EdgeTier Wins Google’s Adopt a Startup Programme 2019

EdgeTier, a machine learning startup focussed on the customer care industry has won Google’s Adopt a Startup Programme. The artificial intelligence company, whose technology revolutionises customer care organisations, beat off stiff competition to win the prestigious programme, following a Dragon’s Den style pitch to a panel of judges including Google’s Paddy Flynn, Director of Geo Operations; Patrick Walsh, founder & CEO, Dogpatch Labs, Nicola McClafferty, Investment Director, Drapers Esprit and Niall McEvoy, High Potential Startups Manager, Enterprise Ireland.

EdgeTier’s automated agent assistant, ‘Arthur’, sits beside customer service advisors and uses AI, analytics, automation and machine learning to quickly generate personalised and accurate responses to every customer query. The innovative software works seamlessly with customer service staff, to answer complex customer queries more efficiently and accurately while retaining a personal touch for every customer. Arthur decreases query handling times by up to 80% while raising the quality of consumer experience and providing administrators with a detailed view of the data behind their contact centre operations.

EdgeTier will receive €10,000 in Google Ads credit and will become eligible for the Google Cloud Platform for startups which come with $100,000 Google Cloud Credit.

Dr Shane Lynn, CEO, EdgeTier said; “We’re delighted with this recognition from Google. Participating in the programme has been a revelation for us. We realised early in the programme that we needed to focus on two key objectives – growing our company outside of Ireland and scaling our team with the best possible people for that growth. Over the course of the 8-week programme, we had fantastic access to Google specialists who helped us to find solutions to some of the challenges we were facing.

“We recently secured a €1.5m seed funding round from the UK and Irish-based investors that will enable us to aggressively grow the company in the coming months. The insights from Google’s Adopt a Start-Up Programme will help us to scale more effectively, avoiding pitfalls along the way.

“Customer service is a gigantic market; there are over 6,000 customer contact centres in the UK alone. Our software has been shown to deliver up to an 80% reduction in handling times, making customer care agents five times more efficient than colleagues not using Arthur. The opportunities for our technology scale beyond pure efficiency, with gains for operations teams in data access and visibility across the centre.

“Using Google analytics and market finder helped us to really understand our target markets and our competitors’ activities, allowing us to refine our sales approach and help identify new opportunities. Engaging with the Google Cloud team and the Talent team has also given us fresh insights into scaling our business and particularly our sales function”.

Paddy Flynn, Director at Google said: “We’re delighted to name EdgeTier as the winners of this year’s final as we felt that they showed that had learnt the most from the programme and demonstrated a real change from what they had learned.

“Their self-awareness as a business is extremely high. They knew what they didn’t know and quickly went about finding the answers they were seeking. They really took advantage of the opportunity to work closely with Google experts and they are well positioned to achieve their objectives.

“I think the opportunity for EdgeTier to grow is extremely high. The market segment they are targeting is ripe for the AI based solution they have developed. They are in the right place, at the right time with the right product to achieve success”.

Paddy Flynn added: “It wasn’t an easy decision for the judges, given the richness of talent and the achievements of our finalists over the past eight weeks. All our Adopt A Startup companies have shown real promise throughout the programme and I expect we’ll be hearing a lot more from them over the coming years”.

The four other finalists who competed for the top award were Allergy Lifestyle, Suresitter, Vrai and Coroflow. Second-placed Allergy Lifestyles received €5,000 in Google Ads credit while third-placed Coroflow received €3,000 in Google Ads credit. SureSitter.was awarded 3 months free hotdesking at Dogpatch Labs.