Limitless raises $6.55 million Series A to take AI powered crowd-sourcing platform global

Limitless Technology, the London-based startup that helps businesses turns their customers into trusted brand ambassadors, announced it has raised $6.55 million (£5 million) in Series A funding to continue disrupting the customer service industry by further developing its SmartCrowd  technology and expansion across Europe, North America and Asia. The round was led by AlbionVC, with participation from all existing investors including Downing Ventures and Unilever Ventures.

Founded in 2018, Limitless is the inventor and provider of a SaaS platform offering AI and crowd sourced customer service solutions. Limitless is disrupting the customer service industry by enabling organisations to crowd source customer support. Limitless helps brands find, manage and reward “Customer Experts.” Its service is currently used by global corporations including Microsoft, Unilever and Vodafone.

SmartCrowd™ uses AI and crowd-sourcing to help businesses transform their customer experience by turning their most loyal customers into freelance customer experts and rewards them for providing on-demand support. Since launching in 2018, it now consists of four solutions to help businesses meet their various customer experience and insight needs – CrowdService®, CrowdCoach™, CrowdAdvise™ and CrowdFeedback™.

Globally, over 100 brands are already using SmartCrowd™ technology to deliver amazing customer experiences. This includes international and multi-product support for global enterprises such as Unilever, Microsoft, Daily Mail Group, National Express, Wargaming, Northumbrian Water and Amazon.

Brands which adopt SmartCrowd have seen significant reduction in costs by up to 50%. They are also seeing a dramatic increase in customer satisfaction thanks to the benefit from having an ‘always open’ 24/7 customer service operation, in any language, due to a flexible talent pool of Experts.

With the new funding, Limitless will further develop its core SmartCrowd™ technology to help businesses access diverse, agile and flexible talent in any language across the world. The investment will also be used to enhance its machine learning technology, which sits at the heart of its SmartAI™ solution. Limitless also intends to use the capital to aggressively grow its sales and marketing efforts in the UK and US and expand our operations in India.

Commenting on the funding, Robert Whitby-Smith, Partner, AlbionVC said, “There is an opportunity for brands to transform their customer service by leveraging the power of the crowd. Creating a customer community which engages and rewards customers for helping other customers is the future – it is better, faster and cheaper. However, executing this at scale needs a rare combination of tech savvy and deep domain expertise – which Team Limitless have in spades from the previous business they built. We are proud to support Roger and Megan achieve their exciting vision.”

Stan Sthanunathan, Executive Vice President – Consumer & Market Insights at Unilever Ventures says: “Today’s consumers want more insightful and faster responses and Limitless offers us a way to provide this by leveraging the knowledge and enthusiasm of some of our biggest brand advocates.

Today, we’ve rolled out Limitless in 5 of our global markets and we’re on track to expand this freelance service model across 19 of our global markets this year.

Unilever Ventures is passionate about investing in young and promising technologies, helping support their growth by providing access to our global network and expertise. The future looks exciting for Limitless and we are thrilled to be on this journey with them.”

Roger Beadle, CEO and co-founder of Limitless says, “We are delighted to have secured this round of funding with our investors, which will help us take our promise of ‘an on-demand, flexible talent pool of Customer Experts’ to more businesses around the world.

Morgan Stanley predicts that within 10 years 50% of US workers will be freelancers. This growth is being driven by millennials who will account for more than a third of the global workforce by 2020 according to EY, and businesses need to embrace their new attitudes and approaches. Limitless is perfectly poised to help enterprises embrace this change, whilst boosting their customer service efforts. We firmly believe that crowd sourcing, together with AI, will become an integral part of an ecosystem of technologies that will fundamentally change the future of customer engagement.”