Marking its third funding round of the year, Kustomer Inc. today announced that it has picked up $60 million in additional capital from Coatue, Tiger Global Management and Battery Ventures.

New York-based Kustomer has built a customer service platform that allows companies to handle inquiries from buyers more efficiently. The offering is built around a customer relationship management system that brings together data points such as users’ buying history and what pages they viewed in a company’s e-commerce site.  

Kustomer makes all this information available to service representatives in one interface. If a customer asks for a refund on their most recent purchase, the agent on the line can pull up their buying history and quickly locate the relevant transaction. If a user is reaching out with a recurring question, the agent could load that person’s earlier help desk conversations for context.

Contact center agents can talk with customers directly via Kustomer. The startup provides communications features that make it possible to start conversations via email, chat, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, among  other channels.

Kustomer is positioning the platform as a one-stop toolkit for managing a company’s customer service interactions. To compete with bigger rivals such as Salesforce.com Inc. that  offer similar capabilities, the startup has started adding artificial intelligence features that automate parts of users’ work. A tool called KustomerIQ that it debuted in October uses AI to perform tasks such as determining which agent is best suited to handle a given inquiry.

A long list of brands is using the startup’s platform to manage their customer service operations. Notable adopters include Amazon.com Inc.’s Ring smart home unit, Abercrombie & Fitch Co. and Birkenstock GmbH.

Kustomer’s new $60 million round reportedly values it at more than $500 million. The startup will use the capital to open an office in European office in the first quarter and triple the size of its development team over the course of 2020.

Kustomer has raised a total of $173.5 million in funding to date. Besides the three funds that participated in its latest round, the startup is backed by Cisco Systems Inc., Redpoint Ventures Canaan Partners and a number of other institutional backers. 

Photo: Kustomer