Managing talent effectively is crucial to achieving organisational business goals regardless of industry. However, in today’s digital environment, managing and advancing team performance remains a challenge, even for huge organisations. And here’s where Amsterdam-based Kaizo starts to matter.
The Dutch work management platform provides a unified performance management platform to facilitate team improvement from the bottom up.
Recently, Kaizo (previously Ticketless) announced the extension of its $4M (approx €3.3M) seed round led by Fortino Capital. Last year, the startup raised $3M (approx €2.4M) in seed capital co-led by Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI fund) and Partech.
Fortino Capital Partners
Fortino Capital Partners is a Belgian VC and growth private equity firm investing in European software and technology companies with a focus on the Benelux, France, and Germany.
The company mainly invests in early growth (venture capital) and more mature companies (growth capital), for which organic growth is at the heart of their strategy. It has offices in Belgium and the Netherlands.
Fund utilisation
Kaizo plans to use the funds to enhance its platform, broadening its customer base to empower more support teams to improve their performance. The company is planning to expand the team as well.
“With the COVID-induced increase in the digital consumer-market and implementation of remote/hybrid workforce models, customer support has never been more powerful towards a business’ success. Kaizo is helping organisations unlock the full extent of this power. Both to satisfy growing consumer demands by actively maintaining and improving employees’ efficiency and performance. Also, by creating interactive, digital work environments that help managers lead hybrid teams in today’s agile business environment,” says Christoph Auer-Welsbach, CEO at Kaizo
Workforce Performance Management
Founded by Christoph Auer-Welsbach, and Dominik Blattner in 2018, Kaizo provides a Workforce Performance Management (WPM) platform for the remote-working industry, customer support.
The company leverages gamification and AI to improve operational efficiency, individual productivity, and team engagement. With its solution, Kaizo aims to guide employees towards better results.
Kaizo says it enables workforce performance management on every level of a customer service department – from agent self-development to multi-team management. The company claims it is one of the most sought-after WFM solutions on the Zendesk Marketplace.
On a managerial level, the Dutch startup gives leaders the ability to efficiently guide their teams’ performance on a team and individual level. Further, the company also provides reporting, capacity planning, QA tools, and real-time performance insights for managers.
This allows them to easily pinpoint performance issues and utilise the point system to guide and incentivise their team to improve rapidly, says the company in the press release.
Free and Paid tools
At present, over a thousand companies work with Kaizo including the likes of Foot Locker, Axonius, and Marley Spoon. The Dutch company offers a suite of free and paid tools ($29 (approx €24) /per month and Enterprise), enabling agents to self-manage while also digitally engaging with their colleagues.
“We’re excited to work with Christoph and Dominik to build the next generation cloud-based, data/AI-enabled tools to help the 17M contact centre agents out there be more successful in a > $350B market. The rate with which they are able to acquire customers is impressive and a great start,” says Marcel van der Heijden, Partner at Fortino Capital
