Canada's Symend, a customer engagement platform for debt recovery, announced a $52 million raise Thursday that will help grow its Denver-based team.
The round was led by global technology venture firm Inovia Capital, with participation from a consortium of investors including Ignition Partners, Impression Ventures, BDC Capital’s Women in Technology Fund, Mistral Venture Partners and angel investor Markus Frind.
Symend's engagement platform combines behavioral science with advanced AI, machine learning and analytics capabilities to develop individualized programs for people at risk of defaulting on payments.
Enterprise organizations like service providers, financial institutions and utilities can digitally interact with their at-risk customers using Symend. The company has served over 10 million at-risk customers to date through their digital engagement platform and is on track to treat 100 million by the end of 2020.
Symend will use the funding raised to invest in development of its digital engagement platform, expand into new verticals and geographies and grow the team across Canadian and U.S. operations.
According to CEO Hanif Johsaghani, Symend has increased in size by three times in the last year and expects to grow to over 200 employees by the end of 2020.
Today, a tenth of the company's workforce is based in the U.S., with the majority of them in Denver.
"We are looking to exponentially grow the team in the U.S., and Denver is our main sales office," Johsaghani told Colorado Inno. "In addition to sales, we are hiring across all domains including behavioral science, client success and marketing."
The company, which launched in 2016, said Denver stood out because of its location and available talent.
"Denver is uniquely positioned in the U.S. to reach the major U.S. telcos and finance institutions," Johsaghani said. "The talent that is located in Denver is excellent for a company like Symend and we have already attracted some top sales people in the city."
Prior to this round, the company had raised only $8 million in outside capital.
