Our Seed in Airkit

I first started teaming with Steve Ehikian and Adam Evans at RelateIQ where we served as CEO, COO and CTO, respectively. We were a team when Accel led our Series A, and a team when Salesforce acquired RelateIQ four years on. When they first told me their idea for Airkit, it was with no hesitation that I jumped at the chance of teaming up with them once again and asked to write their first check. It also helped that their idea was a really good one—quite simply, Airkit is a low code platform for Customer Engagement. 

Consumers increasingly favor brands with great customer experiences. But this means something different than what it meant 10 years ago. Great customer experience is quick, effective, ubiquitous. More likely it is digital, not a person at the end of the phone. In fact, according to a recent study by American Express, over 60 percent of US consumers prefer automated self-service, such as a website or mobile app, for simple customer service tasks, and consumer preference for mobile customer service has grown by 71% since 2014.

But a great digital experience is no simple feat. It requires integration into existing systems for personalization, custom workflows for each customer scenario, communication across new channels (text, chat, web, voice, mobile). Developing digital customer experiences is costly, slow and dependent on scarce development resources. 

Enter Airkit: Steve, Adam and their team have spent the past two years in stealth building a product that provides out-of-the-box support for multi-channel, customer journeys assembled like building blocks. Unlike other general purpose low-code platforms, Airkit is purpose-built for customer experience—which means enterprise grade availability, security and compliance (PCI, GDPR, HIPAA) required for customer data.

Despite being a relatively young company that has deliberately stayed under the radar, they’ve already seen incredible customer demand. For example, Tui is Europe’s largest tour operator and launched smart self-service with Airkit to lower development time from 5 months to 2 weeks, with zero technical resources needed. EZR fielded thousands of calls and manually collected information regarding returns and, during peak seasons, spent weeks training temporary agents to manage the spike in call volume. After adopting Airkit they saw a 60% reduction in planned contact center headcount, 2x increase in cases handled per agent and 140% ROI within the first 8 months.

Accel already has a long history of investing in low code, having partnered with companies like Webflow, BRYTER, Process Street and more. We believe low code will continue to democratize technical processes, helping to enable every company to be a “tech” company.

You can read more about Airkit and their journey in Forbes here. Today, I couldn’t be more thrilled to bring Steve and Adam back into the #AccelFamily with our investment in Airkit. This is just the beginning of another, fantastic journey together.

—Steve Loughlin