Social Leverage is a Venture Capital firm which specializes in early-stage and seed-stage investments in the Software, Consumer, and Fintech industries.   Their investment selection process combines fundamental business evaluation, supported by two decades of domain experience building, valuing, and selling companies, with a strong deal flow pipeline consisting of top-ranked VC / PE funds, exceptional entrepreneurs and innovative management teams.  Social Leverage uses these value drivers to invest in the best capital light companies with a viable product, serving a large addressable market, and solving a known pain point.  Notable investments include Robinhood, Kustomer, Angellist, Wag, EToro, and Ticketfly.

Social Leverage

Before you build your team, before you write your first line of code, before you even take your first check—that’s when boldstart gets to work. We collaborate with technical founders well before company creation, lead pre-product rounds at inception, and rally our developer-first and SaaS network to help turn bold ideas into category-creating iconic companies. We’ve been in the trenches with Snyk, Blockdaemon, Kustomer, BigID, Superhuman (and so many more) from day one. The investment firm was founded in 2010 by Ed Sim and is headquartered in Miami, FL with Partners in Boston, Bay Area, and London.

boldstart ventures

Plug and Play is a seed and early-stage investor focused on great teams leading emerging growth companies.  Plug and Play runs 12 industry-specific accelerator programs twice a year, that acts as a platform for major corporations and high quality startups to connect and collaborate.  Located in the heart of Silicon Valley, Plug and Play participates in Seed, Angel and Series A funding where they often co-invest with their strategic partners. Through years of experience and as part of their network, Plug and Play has put together a world-class network of serial entrepreneurs, strategic investors, and industry leaders who actively assist the firm with its successful and growing investment portfolio.  SEED ROUND. Plug and Play participates in seed round investing through a program called Startup Camp. Startup Camp is a 10-week program based in Silicon Valley for top-notch entrepreneurs to work intensively on building out their business model. Select startups will refine their business models and prototypes with help from a combination of structured workshops, speaker series and mentorship sessions, as well as active coaching from their investment team. At the culmination of Startup Camp, founders will have crystalized their business plans and pitched their company to the venture capital community at EXPO Demo Day.''  ANGEL ROUND Plug and Play makes angel round investments throughout the year, sourced from their monthly Plug and Play Angels (PAPA) sessions. They are partnered with local angel investors in Silicon Valley who participate in PAPA to find the most promising startups and best new technologies.  SERIES A. Series A typical Series A round is in the range of $2 million to $10 million, and is intended to provide operating capital for the company for six months to two years. This round capitalizes the company as it develops its products, performs initial marketing and branding, acquires talent, and conducts other early-stage business operations. It is in this stage that Plug and Play will co-invest with over 180 venture capital partners.  Plug and Play has helped grow market leaders such as PayPal, Danger, Google, DropBox, LendingClub, Zoosk, SoundHound, CreditSesame, Skytree, and has over 400 more early-stage startups in its portfolio.

Plug and Play

BoxGroup is an early-stage investment fund that invests in technology companies. The fund aims to invest in the consumer, enterprise, fintech, healthcare, life science, and marketplaces industries at the earliest stage, as early as pre-seed round and as late as Series A. It supports companies based on a conviction in the team and seeks entrepreneurs working at the beginning of movements in existing markets or new markets yet to be created and with visions to create the next generation of category-defining businesses. Their typical investment ranges from $200,000 to $500,000. Adam Rothenberg and David Tisch founded BoxGroup in 2009 in New York, New York.

BoxGroup

Canaan is an early stage venture capital firm that invests in entrepreneurs with visionary ideas. With $5B under management, a diversified fund and over 190 exits to date, Canaan has invested in some of the world's leading technology and healthcare companies over the past 30 years. Canaan’s focus areas include fintech, enterprise/cloud, marketplaces, frontier tech, biopharma, digital health, and medtech.

Canaan Partners

Redpoint has partnered with visionary founders to create new markets and redefine existing ones since 1999. The firm invests in startups across seed, early, and growth phases. In total, Redpoint manages $4 billion across multiple funds.

Redpoint

Cisco Investments is an active investor with more than 40 investment professionals with deep market and technology expertise located in major geographies, including US, Canada, China, India, Israel, and Europe. Over the last 20 years, Cisco Investments has invested in hundreds of companies across different segments and helped them build to successful IPOs or acquisitions. They currently have an active portfolio of $2B with over 80 direct investments around the world, and they also hold Limited Partner positions in over 35 funds globally.

Cisco Investments

Battery Ventures is a investment firm that focuses on technology. It invests in potentially, category-defining businesses in markets including application software, IT infrastructure technologies, consumer-internet and mobile services, and industrial technologies.

Battery Ventures

Founded in 2001, Tiger Global Management, LLC (“Tiger Global”) is a New York-based investment firm pursuing a long-term approach to investing in leading, global public and private companies that leverage technological innovation. Tiger Global’s public equity business includes fundamentally oriented long/short, long-focused and crossover strategies, targeting investments in high-quality, public growth companies. The private equity business invests in early through late stage companies that pursue innovative approaches to new and existing industries, building on over 20 years of experience investing in hundreds of businesses in more than 30 countries with more than 90 portfolio company IPOs. With a strong track record investing across sectors and stages, Tiger Global aims to be a thought partner to companies and their management teams across their lifecycle in public and private markets. The Firm’s mission is to generate world-class returns for its investors and to do so in a way that makes its employees, partners and portfolio companies proud.

Tiger Global Management

Coatue is a privately owned hedge fund sponsor. The firm invests in the public equity markets globally focusing on investments in technology, media, and telecommunications in addition to other sectors. It employs a long or short strategy to make its investments.

Coatue

Kustomer

Kustomer is the omnichannel SaaS CRM platform reimagining enterprise customer service to deliver standout experiences. It scales to meet the needs of any contact center and business by unifying data from multiple sources, enabling companies to deliver service and support through a single timeline view. Kustomer is the core platform of some of the leading customer service brands like Ring, Glovo, Glossier, Sweetgreen, Away, Rent the Runway, and UNTUCKit. The company was founded in 2015 and is headquartered in New York.

Kustomer is a customer service CRM platform that helps businesses manage high support volume across multiple channels. The platform consolidates customer data and interactions from various sources into a unified timeline view, providing agents with comprehensive context for each customer. Kustomer's omnichannel support capabilities enable companies to handle customer inquiries via email, chat, phone, social media, and other channels from a single interface. The software utilizes AI and automation to streamline workflows, route tickets, and provide agents with suggested actions and responses. Kustomer's features include ticketing, knowledge base management, analytics and reporting, customer self-service options, and integrations with ecommerce and other business systems. The platform aims to empower agents to deliver personalized, efficient customer support at scale.

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RingCentral

Aircall is a cloud-based phone system and call center software founded in 2014 in Paris, France. The company provides businesses with a virtual call center solution that integrates seamlessly with popular CRM and helpdesk tools. Aircall's platform enables companies to set up professional phone systems quickly, manage calls and contacts efficiently, and analyze call data to improve performance. Key features include auto-attendants, call routing, contact center management, advanced analytics, and integrations with tools like Salesforce, Zendesk, and Slack.
As of 2024, Aircall serves over 13,000 companies worldwide and has offices in New York, Paris, Sydney, Madrid, Berlin, and London. The company's cloud-based solution eliminates the need for complex hardware installations, making it suitable for businesses of all sizes, from small teams to large enterprises. Aircall's platform is designed to be accessible, transparent, and collaborative, allowing for easy management of phone systems across distributed teams.
Aircall offers three main pricing tiers: Essentials, Professional, and Custom. The Essentials plan starts at USD 30 per user per month when billed annually, with a minimum of three users. This plan includes features like unlimited calls in the US and Canada, basic integrations, and call recording. The Professional plan, priced at USD 50 per user per month when billed annually, adds advanced features such as Salesforce integration, call monitoring, and advanced analytics. Custom plans are available for larger organizations with specific needs.
In June 2022, Aircall announced that it had reached USD 100 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), achieving "centaur" status - a term used to describe companies with USD 100 million or more in ARR. This milestone came just one year after Aircall reached unicorn status with a valuation of over USD 1 billion. The company's growth has been fueled by increasing demand for cloud-based communication solutions, particularly as businesses adapt to remote and hybrid work environments.

Aircall

Acquire is a unified customer engagement platform that enables businesses to provide efficient, real-time customer communications across multiple channels. The platform combines several key features including live chat, chatbots, co-browsing, video calls, knowledge base software, and a shared inbox. Acquire aims to help companies deliver personalized, omnichannel experiences that modern customers demand without requiring complex IT infrastructure.
The platform allows businesses to respond to customer queries from a single dashboard, providing a consolidated view of all customer interactions. Acquire's live chat functionality works across devices and browsers to offer on-demand support during business hours. Its no-code chatbot builder allows companies to create custom workflows for handling repetitive queries 24/7. The co-browsing feature enables agents to view and interact with customers' browsers in real-time without requiring any downloads. Acquire also includes built-in knowledge base software to organize self-help resources that can be integrated with live chat.
One of Acquire's key differentiators is its video chat capability, which allows face-to-face customer interactions with one-click initiation and no installation required. The platform also provides analytics to measure customer data and gain deeper insights. Acquire is designed to integrate with existing IT resources and offers over 50 integrations with sales, support, social, and analytics tools.
Key customers and partnerships
The Dufresne Group, a Canadian home furnishing retailer, successfully implemented Acquire's video chat feature to reduce furniture repair costs and improve online customer engagement. When faced with pandemic restrictions, the company expanded its use of Acquire to facilitate virtual furniture sales through video tours and co-browsing, allowing them to pivot their business model without additional investment or training.

Acquire

CloudTalk is a provider of AI-powered calling solutions and call center software for modern businesses. Founded in 2016 in Bratislava, Slovakia, the company offers a cloud-based platform that helps sales, customer service, and marketing teams connect with clients more efficiently. CloudTalk's VoIP business calling solution automates workflows and provides managers with built-in analytics to optimize performance and increase calling efficiency. The platform features over 70 features and integrates with leading CRMs and helpdesk tools, centralizing and processing all calling data to allow businesses to customize their customer experience.
CloudTalk's technology includes its own virtual 'phone suite' that integrates with CRMs and support tools, providing key information to customer service and sales teams during calls and enabling easy updates afterward. This capability is estimated to save users 2-3 minutes per call. The company has also built its own infrastructure, giving it better control over voice quality. CloudTalk's recent focus has been on enhancing its AI-powered cloud phone system and contact center solutions, incorporating features such as AI-powered dialers, conversational intelligence, speech recognition, call summarization, automated note-taking, and sentiment analysis.
Key customers and partnerships
CloudTalk reported serving over 4,000 sales and customer-facing teams across more than 100 countries, powering more than 400 million customer conversations. The company primarily attracts small to medium-sized businesses with an average of 10 to 3,000 users, but also counts larger organizations among its clients. Notable customers include Glovo, OYO, Fujitsu, Tier, DHL, and Nokia. CloudTalk's solution is used across various industries, with a particular focus on financial services, where it helps businesses scale their communication capabilities alongside their growing client base.

CloudTalk

Talkdesk is a leading cloud-based contact center software provider founded in 2011. The company offers an end-to-end solution designed to help businesses improve customer experiences and agent productivity. Talkdesk's platform combines enterprise scalability with consumer simplicity, delivering advantages in speed, agility, reliability, and security.
Talkdesk's core offering is the CX Cloud, an AI-powered contact center solution that supports omnichannel interactions across voice, email, chat, SMS, and social media. Key features include intelligent call routing, interactive voice response (IVR), workforce management, quality management, real-time and historical reporting, and integrations with popular CRM systems. The platform leverages artificial intelligence throughout, including for agent assistance, sentiment analysis, and automated quality management.
In 2022, Talkdesk introduced industry-specific solutions called Talkdesk Industry Experience Clouds. These are purpose-built contact center platforms for sectors like retail, financial services, and healthcare. They come pre-configured with industry-specific workflows, AI models, and integrations to accelerate deployment and ROI for companies in those verticals.
Talkdesk places a strong emphasis on ease of use and rapid deployment. The company claims its solutions can be set up in minutes rather than months. The platform is designed to be intuitive for agents, supervisors, and administrators alike. Talkdesk also offers extensive customization options and open APIs for businesses that need to tailor the solution to their specific needs.
Key customers and partnerships
Talkdesk serves customers across various industries, ranging from small businesses to large enterprises. The company states it has "thousands" of customers worldwide, including Fortune 500 enterprises. Talkdesk has over 60 pre-built integrations with platforms like Salesforce, Microsoft Teams, and Zendesk. In July 2022, Talkdesk announced a partnership with Cognizant to bring its Industry Experience Clouds to more enterprises globally and provide implementation support.

Talkdesk

Platforms offering centralized customer interaction and support services via phone, email, live chat, or social media

Platforms that gather feedback from various channels, such as surveys, reviews, and social media,  to gain insights, identify trends, and make data-driven decisions to improve customer experiences

Platforms that offer a centralized repository for organizing information, resources, and documentation, allowing users to access relevant self-service resources related to a specific subject or domain

Platforms for managing customer inquiries, complaints, and technical issues by streamlining ticketing, facilitating communication, and tracking request status

Platforms that enable real-time communication between customers and support agents by offering chat interfaces, file-sharing capabilities, and visitor monitoring

Platforms that provide a comprehensive software solution that consolidates various tools and functionalities, including ticketing, case management, knowledge base, live chat, social media management, self-service options, and analytics

Companies that use GenAI as a core part of their product offering for customer service

AI/ML improves customer service by automating tasks, enhancing response times, and personalized experiences.

Leverages customer data, such as past interactions, purchase history, and preferences, to personalize the experience.

Generative AI automates responses, analyze data, and provide personalized solutions for customer feedback and help-desk.

Supports hybrid working model by providing remote access, collaboration, omnichannel support, self-service options, and analytics.

NLP improves communication and support by analyzing customer inquiries and feedback, enhancing relevance.

Kustomer

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