The round is led by the company's existing investors, HV Holtzbrinck Ventures and Maki.vc. In addition, the EU granted research funding as part of Horizon 2020, a programme committed to backing Europe's leading deep technology businesses.
Ultimate's European founding story has given it a technical advantage in the market, attracting EU interest and prompting existing investors to double down. Founded in Finland, the business faced a defining challenge: there was no AI technology capable of handling the complex Finnish language. Leveraging recent breakthroughs in deep learning, the founders built the leading fully-language agnostic AI platform for customer service. Today Ultimate provides its multilingual customer service automation to multinational enterprises including Telia, ADAC and Finnair.
"We were astonished by the hiring success, technology advancement and go to market speed the team has shown just one year after the seed round. Ultimate follows Kasparov’s law and augments every customer support agent no matter how good they are. That is one of the biggest market potential you can find nowadays. It was obvious to HV to double down on this opportunity."
Jasper Masemann, Principal at HV.
The financing comes at a time of significant growth for the company, which celebrates its third anniversary on November 4th. In the 12 months since raising Seed, Ultimate has seen its revenue grow tenfold. A notable portion of this growth is driven by existing clients, as they expand customer service automation to new geographies and channels, a capability Ultimate’s multilingual technology is uniquely positioned to provide. This growth has enabled the business to triple their team, which now lists 30 people.
In addition to offering a global solution, Ultimate markets a unique approach to automation in customer service: augmentation. In line with industry best-practice, the AI resolves transactional, repetitive requests automatically, savings businesses millions and providing customers 24/7 multilingual support. However, Ultimate goes a step further. When complex cases are handed over to agents, the AI moves into a supporting role, guiding agents with response suggestions in real time. Agents are empowered to work faster and more stress free, while businesses are able to ensure customer experience stays front and center.
"We believe strongly in a customer-first mindset; a commitment we share with our clients. Keeping the experiences of support agents and customers are the heart of our AI is core to building a world-leading product. We are excited about the impact we are having and will continue to improve customer experiences around the world and establish Ultimate as the market leader for customer service automation."
Reetu Kainulainen, CEO and Co-founder
Ultimate has previously raised $300k angel investment and a $1.3M Seed Round in 2018.
About Ultimate
Ultimate is the leading solution for enterprise customer service automation. Our multilingual, intelligent layer automates repetitive customer service cases and guides agents with answer recommendations through complex tasks. Ultimate is partnered with leading CRM providers Zendesk and Freshworks. The company is based across Helsinki and Berlin and supports leading businesses including Finnair, Telia and ADAC.
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About HV Holtzbrinck Ventures
Since 2000 HV Holtzbrinck Ventures has been investing in internet and technology companies across several fund generations and is one of the most successful, experienced and well financed early stage and growth investors in Europe. HV has financed over 160 companies, such as Zalando, Delivery Hero, FlixBus and Scalable Capital. The total volume of all HV funds is € 1.05 billion. HV supports startups with investments from € 500,000 to € 40m. Hence, it is one of the few venture capital firms in Europe, which is able to support companies through all investment stages.
About Maki Ventures
Maki.vc is a Helsinki-based VC launched by serial entrepreneur Ilkka Kivimäki and former F-Secure and startup executive Pirkka Palomäki. With a fund size of 76M€, Maki.vc supports exceptional seed and early stage companies. The fund searches for best teams that have potential to reshape markets across geographical areas and industries, home base being Northern Europe.