Amsterdam-based community engagement platform inSided announces a € 6 million Series A investment round, led by global venture capital fund Ventech, together with Fortino Capital and henQ. The investment follows after welcoming large enterprise customers and a fast expansion across Europe.
“While many companies are active on external social media, inSided provides a company owned social platform for brands like Sonos, TomTom and Ahold” says Robin van Lieshout, CEO of inSided. “Many companies now build their online presence on borrowed ground, which can be dangerous in the long term”. While traditional forum-based communities have been around for decades, inSided has added technology to reach existing company business goals, with results like 80% less calls to the contact centre leading to over € 3.5m saved per year for T-Mobile, or increasing NPS by 19 points for Rabobank.
“As more and more companies are investing in digital customer experience, we realized that inSided can make brands relevant again” says Duco Sickinghe, partner at Fortino Capital. “inSided provides a way for businesses to connect at large scale with their customers, and empowers these customers to interact efficiently amongst each other and with brands”. Customers can ask questions, find answers, co-create, share experiences and provide reviews on products and services – all on the owned digital channels. The platform runs on the Amazon cloud, and offers deep business integrations with systems like CRM and analytics.
“The ability to execute on their strategy and the strong company culture set inSided up for market leadership” says Coen van Duiven, partner at henQ. “This investment will be used to support the ongoing internationalization strategy as well as increasing the speed of product innovation”. inSided doubles in size every year, currently has 60+ employees and in the last months expanded to France, Germany, Ireland, Finland and Spain. In the coming 12 months, inSided will hire between 50 and 100 new employees worldwide to strengthen its team and market leadership in Europe.
“By investing together with henQ and Fortino Capital, we can leverage experience, effectiveness and operational strength.” says Audrey Soussan, Principal at Ventech. “Working with this international team of investors we are really excited to strengthen the global ambitions of inSided”.
