ZineOne Raises $2.5 Million Series A Round Led by Omidyar Network

The company helps traditional brick-and-mortar enterprises re-imagine customer engagement in a new, real-time, high-touch, digital world

MILPITAS, California, March 20, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- ZineOne today announced that it has raised $2.5 million in a Series A round led by Omidyar Network, the Silicon Valley-based impact investing firm established by Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay. ZineOne is a next generation customer engagement hub that uses machine learning algorithms to provide banks and retailers with the ability to engage with their customers real-time, in a highly contextual and personalized manner. The platform is redefining the brand-user interaction paradigm by helping enterprises not only connect the dots between their different customer data streams, but also create actionable insights that can be used while customers are interacting with their brand in real time—such as in a branch or store, at their e-commerce website or mobile app.

"More and more enterprises around the world are recognizing the need to move their customer engagement efforts beyond e-mails and call centers into an immediate, contextual, and real-time world," said Debjani Deb, ZineOne CEO. "2018 presents an inflection point in the industry, and with this new funding, ZineOne is well positioned to lead the market in this emerging segment."

The emerging category of customer engagement hubs is expected to disrupt an estimated $10 billion currently spent on marketing automation and customer experience software worldwide, by moving the industry away from batch emails, push messaging, and call centers, to "in the moment" interactions.

"We are excited to see how artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other new technologies are coming together to personalize and enhance the consumer experience," said Ken Miller, venture partner at Omidyar Network and ZineOne's newest board member. "ZineOne delivers on this promise and benefits banks and retailers who are looking to better serve their clients, but most importantly consmers, who now have products and services tailored to meet their unique needs and delivered when they need them."

The company intends to use the newly raised funds to aggressively accelerate sales, marketing, and execution of a product roadmap that is focused on building the most intelligent system within this category, with significant investments toward securing top talent in machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Other investors in this Series A round include Harvard Business School Alumni Angels, Touchstone Equities, as well as existing investors Hyderabad Angels and Golden Seeds.  Anthill Ventures was an advisor to this round.  The Series A round of investments brings ZineOne's total venture capital received to date to $5 million.

Value Proposition

ZineOne is a leading player in the emerging segment of next generation customer engagement hubs, which bring together event-driven, streaming technologies to power real-time personalization. The company's mission is to help traditional brick-and-mortar enterprises re-imagine customer engagement in a new, real-time, high-touch, digital world.

ZineOne currently enables more than 100 million users, processing over 5 billion events a year, and generating 100 gigabyte of data every hour worldwide. In the US, the company works with one of the top five retailers in the country, connecting all its digital and physical channels and delivering three to five times more sales conversions through highly personalized, contextual messaging with customers through various touch points.

In India, ZineOne is enabling financial institutions to provide a seamless digital experience to their customers by using personalized context to nudge consumers to better financial behaviors, such as increasing savings. On average, the company has helped its client-banks increase transaction completion rates up to 20 percent—capturing transactions that were previously abandoned when users moved from channel to channel. HDFC Bank, India's largest private bank, is leveraging ZineOne's value proposition across all its digital channels and experiencing significant gains in customer engagement, including 3 times the click through rate than with traditional methods.

ZineOne provides enterprises with a dynamic platform for agile experimentation, with no impact to their existing release cycles and without changing legacy systems. The company analyses data that consumers have already opted-in to provide to their bank or retailer in a anonymized manner, ensuring consumer's privacy and data security.

About ZineOne, Inc.

ZineOne is a real-time, stream-processing based customer engagement hub. It empowers brands and enterprises to enable a paradigm shift in the way they interact with their customers. It helps the enterprise move from a legacy batch world to a real time, event-driven world, where reactions to each customer's actions are sub-second versus a long phone call or an impersonal email.  ZineOne is set to disrupt the worldwide $10 billion marketing automation and customer experience markets. To learn more, please visit www.zineone.com or follow on Twitter @zine_one.

Media Contacts
ZineOne
Leo Merle, ZineOne, +1 (916) 501-8126, [email protected]

Omidyar Network
Claudia Parazzoli, Omidyar Network, +1 (650) 482-2504, [email protected]
In the US: Gena Madow, FleishmanHillard, +1 (415) 318-4230, g[email protected]
In India: Upasana Sarkar, The PRactice, +91 (858) 707-6270, [email protected]

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