Kaptea, a Dublin-based customer communications software business, aims to raise up to €5 million in its next funding round, due to close in the second half of next year, according to Business Post. The company, which orchestrates customer conversations across channels, also plans to grow turnover from around €1 million to €3 million a year.

Founded in 2020 by Alan McNab and Robert Norton, Kaptea has five staff and has raised €500,000 in funding to date. Its software platform runs in a browser and lets service agents connect with customers irrespective of the channel they use.

The structural driver is disjointed customer conversations. “At a technical level, we orchestrate conversations for businesses; that can be voice, email, SMS, WhatsApp or whatever channel they use,” said McNab, Kaptea’s chief executive. “We organise those channels so that the people receiving the queries are equipped to manage them.”

McNab said the problem is familiar even at home, where a single question can arrive by SMS, WhatsApp and voicemail, and becomes worse in a call centre spanning time zones. “It’s laden with dropped balls,” he said. “That’s what we’re oriented towards, fixing that. We’re trying to orchestrate conversations so that a commitment a business wants to stand over is delivered.”

The idea came from McNab and Norton working together at a US multinational, where they digitised the processes used to improve customer interaction. Starting just as the pandemic began, the company’s first job was a solution integrated with the Covid contact-tracing service, handling messaging around the Irish testing service.

“Right now, we’re experimenting with the platform in two or three industries,” McNab said. “Over the next quarter, we want to focus on one industry and take the business from around €1 million in turnover to €3 million in turnover annually.”

Kaptea is a Twilio consulting partner serving clients from Dublin, as stated on its about page, and its team lists McNab as CEO and Norton as CTO. It builds custom systems on infrastructure partners including Twilio and Telnyx.

For the sector, the plan reflects growing focus on software that joins up customer communication channels so that promises made to customers are tracked through to delivery.