Zingle Secures $11M; Acquires Presto AI

zingleZingle, a Carlsbad, CA-based hotel and resort business-to-customer messaging solution provider, raised $11m in funding.

The round was led by PeakSpan Capital.

The company intends to use the funds to build out its solutions and team as it enter the hospitality sector.

Led by Ford Blakely, CEO & Founder, Zingle provides a two-way, intelligent business-to-consumer messaging software platform that allows companies to engage with their customers in a more personalized way through real-time text messaging. The platform leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to help brands in different verticals, including hospitality, food & beverage, retail, and more, increase efficiency, drive additional revenue and create improved customer experiences.
Through the ability to analyze message intent, the platform is able to understand the guest need and reply with an automatic response, suggest a response for hotel staff to execute, or trigger an activity like creating a service ticket, streamlining operations.

With the acquisition of Philadelphia-based Presto AI, a hospitality-focused, computational linguistics, and data science startup, the company has added the opportunity to categorize over 150 different intents, making responses smarter and more personalized. Message data is also stored in Zingle’s analytics and can be used to inform data-driven decisions, i.e., using message volume trends to make smarter staffing decisions.

The company has also recently made additions to its executive leadership team, recently hiring:
– Jason Hekl, SVP of Marketing (formerly of SiriusDecisions and Coupa Software);
– Ellis Connolly, SVP of Sales (formerly of TrustYou and Cvent), and
– Eric Pannese, SVP of Product (formerly of NuORDER and Intuit).

To date, leading hotels and resorts such as Hyatt, Broadmoor, and Great Wolf have exchanged over 120 million messages with guests on the Zingle platform.

FinSMEs

31/01/2019

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