Involve

involve.ai creates an early warning dashboard to help customer teams with actionable insights and automation to prevent churn, increase upsells, and improve customer experience. Why solve this problem? We launched an employee volunteering and engagement platform in 2016. Users grew, and so did customers. We had nearly 440,000 users on the platform. However, churn became an issue for us. We were losing customers at 20% MoM and wanted to figure out why this was happening and how we could stop it. To solve the issue, we built a simple version of a customer intelligence platform internally. It was designed to unify key indicators for customer experience from product usage, support, and communication signals from our Salesforce, Snowflake, product backend, Zendesk, JIRA, Gmail, and Zoom platforms. These signals would then go through our python algorithms to predict top churn risks, revenue expansion opportunities, and tasks to improve the overall customer experience. Our product didn’t just work; it worked well. In fact, it’s a huge reason we were able to get through COVID. With COVID, the value of each customer became more critical than ever. So we gave our internal platform to 4 companies to try, and they couldn’t stop raving about it. One company reduced churn by 16% and added $400K expansion revenue in just two months. That was our “aha!” moment. Slack was a gaming company for many years before building a collaboration tool internally. If Slack could pivot, so could we. We knew we had built something to solve a problem many companies like ours were facing, and our product could have a massive impact on the world. So in 2020, just last year, we decided to launch involve.ai. Our vision is to make the world customer-centric. Most exciting moment so far? We are proud and grateful to see involve.ai grow from an internal tool to closing $16M Series A led by Sapphire Ventures. We know we are on the right track. It has been a crazy journey for the entire involve.ai team, and the best part? This is just the beginning. Hardest thing about being a founder? I grew up in the suburbs of New Delhi, India. We grew up poor. I lost my dad to cancer when I was two years old. My mom had to work extremely hard, day in and day out, to provide for my older brother and me. Understanding my mother’s hardship, my brother, and I wanted to help. I started coding at 10 years old. Two years later, I built my first video game and never looked back. Growing up poor always made me question my decisions and my own leadership. Becoming a founder left me with terrible imposter syndrome that almost every founder faces. You just have to acknowledge it and keep going. Biggest piece of advice for aspiring founders? Customer interviews. Spend time to do 20-40 customer interviews to validate your hypothesis around the pain, value proposition, differentiation, pricing, etc. We spent a lot of time talking to 44+ VPs of Customer Experience/ Chief Customer Officers to accelerate our learnings. Why Bonfire? I think a short story would be best to describe why Bonfire. One year ago with COVID, our company was not doing well. I made a phone call to Mark Mullen, who is on our board. I had just had a terrible call with our team where we didn’t seem to have a clear path forward with the current product. I called Mark, and I told him what the team was thinking and what our options were. We wanted to pivot, and Mark replied, “Bonfire backed you, not your idea.” He then went on to make 4 essential intros that helped us successfully launch involve.ai. One to our head of Sales, two key customer accounts, and one to our Series A VC. We owe all our success to Bonfire’s partnership with involve.ai. They have taught us how to become good leaders and scale our company. Bonfire Ventures 725 ARIZONA AVENUE #400, SANTA MONICA, CA 90401