SoftBank's vision leads the investment in intelligent customer service solution providers, and Sun Zhengyi's layout of the Chinese track is further expanded

Per reporter: Tang Ruyu Yao Yanan Per editor: Xiao Ruidong

Today (February 14), Wisdom Tooth Technology, an integrated customer contact solution provider, announced the completion of a US$100 million Series D financing, which was led by SoftBank Vision Phase II Fund of SoftBank Group (hereinafter referred to as SoftBank), followed by Yunqi Capital and Hillhouse Venture Capital. This is also the latest investment in China that has been made public after SoftBank's new quarterly earnings report showed that vision fund returns fell by 92% year-on-year.

In recent years, under the tide of policies promoting enterprise management "going to the cloud" and intelligent collaboration, the SaaS track has become one of the new highlands where capital is scrambling to deploy on the To B side. As a customer service field with difficult staff training and serious loss of personnel, it is a major subdivision of new areas that capital and entrepreneurs pay attention to at present.

Digital transformation is broken, and customer service personnel are lost

Every reporter noticed that "Wisdom Tooth Technology" is a SaaS platform that starts from intelligent customer service and provides integrated customer contact solutions. Specifically, it aims to help enterprises reduce costs and increase efficiency and improve user satisfaction through the integration of "marketing + service" scenarios, "software + BPO" business integration, and "public domain + private domain", and its products have been landed in education, retail, medical care, insurance and other industries.

Peng Wei, COO of the company, believes that the pain points in the customer service field are the serious loss of personnel and the rising cost of training. Previously, the "wisdom tooth technology" product was mainly based on a single customer service robot, and the project system served customers, but in the development of the market, it found that the customer service robot was difficult to completely replace people, and a single software product could not meet customer needs well. Since 2015, "Wisdom Tooth Technology" has launched an omni-channel solution from robot customer service to online customer service, call center, work order and a series of tool-based products.

"Wisdom Tooth Technology" said that in recent years, it has been observed that there are three important trends in the field of customer contact: First, service and marketing are no longer proprietary actions at different customer contact stages, and both run through the entire life cycle of customers at the same time, each with its own focus but joint efforts to achieve a closed loop of marketing services. Second, enterprises have expanded from simple public domain traffic acquisition to private domain traffic cultivation, public domain and private domain tandem undertaking, marketing funnel entrance continues to expand, customer stickiness increases, and traffic competition achieves leapfrog upgrade from quantity to quality. Third, the decentralized management of software and people limits the efficiency of business development, and enterprises urgently need to integrate the two organically to achieve management balance and maximize customer contact efficiency.

The reporter noted that at present, "Wisdom Tooth Technology" has completed a total of 7 rounds of financing, investors include Hillhouse Venture Capital, Yonyou, IDG Capital, Zhen Fund and other well-known investment institutions, SoftBank Vision Fund Managing Partner Zhang Kaixun said when talking about the reasons for investment, the progress of artificial intelligence technology and the rapid increase in labor costs highlight the necessity and effectiveness of digital transformation in the field of customer contact, especially in the enterprise service, marketing and other scenarios are more important.

Under the SaaS outlet, SoftBank has added Chinese projects

According to public information, "Wisdom Tooth Technology" is an omni-channel SaaS intelligent customer service system provider. In fact, SaaS is also one of the tracks where the to B-end capital in the venture capital circle has competed in recent years, and there are frequent cases of large financing cases of head capital "piling up". The partner of the Beijing One Dollar Fund once told reporters that SaaS is a typical high-ceiling track; with the continuous strengthening of management information and intelligent awareness, the future annual investment of enterprises in IT or SaaS will be equivalent to the trillion-level market of the advertising industry.

On the other hand, the promotion of policies in recent years has also made business owners aware of the importance of intelligent coordination and "going to the cloud". The "Guidelines for Promoting the Implementation of Enterprise Cloud Migration (2018-2020)" issued in 2018 proposes that by 2020, strive to further optimize the enterprise cloud environment, significantly improve the awareness and enthusiasm of industry enterprises on the cloud, significantly improve the proportion and depth of application of cloud, widely popularize the application of cloud computing in enterprise production, operation and management, add 1 million new cloud enterprises nationwide, form more than 100 typical benchmarking application cases, and form a number of influential, Powered cloud platform and enterprise cloud experience center.

In this way, SaaS enterprise service collaboration has become a new highland for capital to actively deploy on the To B side.

At the same time, it is worth noting that the leading investment in "Wisdom Tooth Technology" is SoftBank's Vision Phase II Fund (hereinafter referred to as Vision Phase II). This is also the latest investment in China that has been made public after SoftBank Group's new quarterly earnings report showed that the Income of the Vision Fund fell by 92% year-on-year.

In August 2021, Sun Zhengyi, chairman and CEO of SoftBank Group, once made a statement on "tentative investment + wait-and-see" China at the earnings conference; then the company issued a statement saying that the media had misinterpreted it. However, it turns out that SoftBank has not stopped its pace of layout in the Chinese market. Its fiscal 2021 third quarter report shows that invested companies in China account for 18% of the fair value of SoftBank Vision I and II fund portfolios, and in Vision II, for example, four of the 10 IPOs it harvested in the first three fiscal quarters of 2021 came from China. From the perspective of investment field, SoftBank's layout in China can also be called a full-track layout, and the invested companies are all over aiot, intelligent manufacturing, enterprise services, education, biomedicine, clothing, services and other industries and industries.

In addition to the "unsustained" layout in China, in fact, Sun Zhengyi is also accelerating the pace of the second phase of the vision. By the end of 2021, the Vision II Fund had secured $51 billion in committed capital and had invested $43.1 billion in more than 200 start-ups worldwide.