Netherlands, June 2024 – Our portfolio company Neople has raised €6 million in Seed funding from Newion and Simon Capital with participation from existing investors Peak & Curiosity VC. Founded in 2023, Neople creates AI co-workers for e-commerce customer support teams.
Investment Highlights
Dutch startup Neople, the software solution that creates AI co-workers for e-commerce customer support teams, raised a €6 million investment round led by Newion and Simon Capital. They are joined in this round by their current investors Peak and Curiosity. The company will use the investment to enter the German market and launch the first AI training center for digital co-workers.
Origins and Vision
Founded just a year ago, the company is on a mission to solve customer support challenges. Consumers demand high-quality support, but support teams struggle with high workloads. Neople solves this problem by offering a digital co-worker. By now, over 100 leading Dutch and German e-commerce businesses have hired a Neople.
Neople will use the investment to expand internationally and build a new AI training center. AI is not widely used in support roles yet, because it often delivers incomplete, incorrect, or poorly toned responses. This is a big deal in highly competitive markets. Neople’s new training center enables senior staff to train AI colleagues so they can eventually provide the best customer service fully autonomously.
Hans de Penning, co-founder and CEO of Neople, explains: “We are on the verge of a shift to a new way of working with technology. Soon, AI colleagues with the right soft skills will automate all repetitive and time-consuming tasks exactly as instructed. This future collaboration is what we call ‘Collegial AI.’
Customer support teams are often the bottleneck of an e-commerce business, dealing with numerous cases, including those from annoyed or even rude customers. Collegial AI makes their jobs more enjoyable and allows them to focus on the edge cases. Thanks to the investment, we’re launching an AI training center to train Neople to reply autonomously. We are also receiving positive signals from businesses outside the Netherlands. It’s about time we expand Neople’s presence globally.”
