Kansas City-based Five Elms Capital led a big Series B round for Portland software maker AskNicely.
The company raised $32 million in the round, it said Monday. It filed paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission for $19.9 million of that.
As part of the deal, Ryan Mandl, partner at Five Elms is joining the AskNicely board. Also included in the round were existing investors Nexus Venture Partners and Blackbird.
AskNicely is the second Portland-area company to be in Five Elms’ portfolio. The company was a backer of Vancouver software maker Hubb, which was sold last summer. It also was an investor in Kansas City software maker RFP360, which was bought last year by Beaverton-based RFPIO.
Mandl said that AskNicely is a tool for service businesses as they face more competition for both customers and employees.
“AskNicely has developed a beautifully elegant set of software solutions to ensure every customer gets the right experience and the frontline worker gets the right feedback, coaching, and recognition for their work,” he said in a written statement. “Given that frontline workers make up 80% of the planet's working population, we see an enormous market opportunity for AskNicely's Frontline Success Platform, and are excited to partner with Aaron and the AskNicely team to continue to develop innovative products for their fast-growing, global customer base.”
This added capital will be used for hiring across the company’s footprint. In addition to its Portland headquarters the company has offices in Auckland, New Zealand and Amsterdam. The company has about 60 employees right now and has several openings across marketing, engineering, product and sales listed on its website.
AskNicely makes software used by customer-facing employees. Its newly developed Frontline Success Platform takes customer service feedback and turns it into personalized coaching and other useful information for frontline employees.
“Traditional customer experience software solutions do an OK job keeping analysts busy with mountains of data, but they totally ignore the actual people responsible for serving the customer,” CEO Aaron Ward said in a written statement. “It's kind of outrageous that the class of worker that's most impactful on the customer experience is also the most underserved, underpaid, and underappreciated. We've designed AskNicely for the frontline worker and made it our mission to make frontline work awesome.”
The company is targeting service businesses and has found traction in health care, hospitality, mortgage lending and financial services, said Robert Galop, vice president of marketing. With the platform an employee gets feedback in the form of recognition of a job well done or the sees an area for focused improvement. The idea is that incremental focus on improvement will yield much bigger overall improvement.
