Estonia-based tech startup Klaus raises $5.4M in funding to help large support teams improve conversations with customers

Customers are the lifeblood of any business and as such, they are essential to business growth. Successful businesses thrive based on how they treat their customers. In the same vein, conversations are the strongest tool you have to build relationships between customers and your brand. Since most businesses are now moving online, you need the best tool to engage with your customers. And that’s where Klaus comes in.

Klaus is a Tallinn, Estonia-base tech startup and a provider of conversation review and customer service quality assurance platform for large support teams. Their platform improves customer service quality by making the internal feedback process easy and systematic at scale. Klaus has been used to give over 4 million instances of feedback on more than 350,000 customer support conversations.

Today, Klaus announced it has raised $5.4 million in new funding to help large support teams improve conversations with customers. The round was led by Global Founders Capital with previous VC investors Creandum, Icebreaker, and angel investors participating in the round. This is not Klaus’s first funding. 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.

Founded in 2018 by Kair Käsper and Martin Kõiva, Klaus 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.

Klaus connects via API 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.

“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 the founders, 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,” says Kõiva who experienced the problem firsthand, running a large support team at another SaaS company Pipedrive.

“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,” explains Global Founders Capital partner Philippe Klintefelt Collet.

“Klaus offers companies the opportunity to give their customers the best possible support interaction experience. With millions of unique feedback instances taking place on the Klaus platform the opportunity for data-driven developments is deep. We are elated to partner with the Klaus team on the road ahead to build a category-defining company,” says Collet.

Klaus’ customer portfolio includes top brands like Automattic, Wolt, Voi, Epic Games, Soundcloud, Doodle, Wistia, Euronics, and Trivago, among others. Klaus has its team spread across Europe, operating on remote-first principles from the start. The team includes people with backgrounds in such tech companies as Microsoft, Zendesk, Pipedrive, Topia, and Twilio to name a few.