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FaceMe is a world-leading provider of Digital Humans globally via its Intelligent Digital Human Platform. The company now operates in NZ, the US, Australia and Europe – having worked for global brands, including Vodafone and UBS. To learn more about FaceMe, read our recent interview with the CEO Danny Tomsett:
Q: Why Digital Humans?
A: Through FaceMe’s unique lens on customer experience challenges, there is growing tension between reducing cost to serve/ maintain margins; and investing enough into growth and improving customer experience. At the intersection of these – companies are hyper-focused on leveraging technology to solve this conundrum. Digital strategies have been highly effective in lowering cost to serve as well as meeting growing customer expectation; but have opened companies up to new risks around the value of a physical store and face-to-face interaction / people contact which has historically been a huge differentiator. For many businesses, emotional connection with their customers has been compromised by their digital strategy and this directly impacts on brand value, revenue growth and churn. This backdrop sets the scene for incredible innovation.
FaceMe is an AI company that has solved for the problem of creating emotional connection through existing and digital channels. FaceMe’s platform supercharges a brand’s ability to create incredible, real-time interaction based on tailored content and memorable personas who build emotional connection with your customers using the power of the human face. We enable companies to reduce the cost to serve at the same time as enabling opportunity for growth and improving customer experience.
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Q: How does the platform work?
A: FaceMe’s Digital Human Platform is a next generation conversational interface for kiosks, browsers and mobile. With the chatbot and virtual assistant market estimated to grow beyond $40B in the next 10 years, human connections will reduce to less than 15% of customer interactions. FaceMe uses advanced machine learning to automatically convert text from a chatbot into key human qualities through both the ability to respond with speech and expression (facial expressions, gestures etc.) and also apply dynamic behaviour based on customers behaviour and emotion. Over 89% of FaceMe users say the experience is both natural and enjoyable and they rate it as their number one preference for digital service. Available as a platform with simple APIs, any Enterprise customer or chatbot product company can easily reimagine and create powerful customer experiences that embody their brand and increase value in a digital world.
Q: Describe your business model and how you make money.
A: FaceMe offers this service as a platform SaaS model which companies can subscribe to on an annual basis. We also work with companies to design and build custom Digital Humans that best embody their brand. This can also include building digital clones of key staff or celebrity brand ambassadors.
Q: Congrats on closing your Series A funding round! Could you tell us something about this?
A: We closed our Series A funding round earlier this month, with a list of highly influential investors confirmed to partner with us as we continue to develop our ground-breaking intelligent Digital Human platform. We’re grateful for their confidence in us, and even more determined to continue leading in this space. Confirmed investors in the round span Australasia and the US. Our Lead investor is Alium Capital while another noteworthy investor is Richard Socher (Chief Scientist Salesforce – ex founder of Metamind acquired by Salesforce – a thought leader in Deep learning for natural language).
It’s an exciting time for FaceMe. We are experiencing considerable growth and demand for our technology as business seek to solve for both cost and experience. We are grateful to our early adopter customers such as the New Zealand and Australian Governments, IBM, Vodafone, ASB, UBS and many others as we’ve validated the value that Digital Humans bring to their customers. We’re about to announce even more companies who will be launching Digital Humans using our intelligent Digital Human platform over the next few months. We’re seeing a growing understanding of the power of AI to augment customer experience – and we’re really excited to be the top choice for many big brands.
Recommended: Q: Where do you want to be in five years’ time?
A: FaceMe believes customer experience will move beyond digitisation to personalisation. In a hyper-connected world –we’ll start to place the customer at the heart of every single innovation. Technology will empower companies to do this – and FaceMe’s Intelligent Digital Human Platform will be the number one way in which to achieve this seamlessly and affordably.
