Playvox Secures $25M Investment & Acquires Agyle Time

It is relatively uncommon to see a Latin American startup receive funding from a U.S. venture capital firm located in the midwest. Playvox, a Colombian company aiming to improve customer service monitoring, has announced a $25 million investment from Five Elms Capital, a Kansas City, MO-based VC firm. The company’s total funding now reaches $34 million.

Alongside this funding, Playvox also revealed another unusual development for a company in its early stages: an acquisition. The startup has purchased Agyle Time, an Australian company specializing in workforce monitoring SaaS tools. This acquisition unites two organizations with similar goals, creating a more comprehensive customer service solution.

Playvox was founded in 2012 by Oscar Giraldo, who has steadily developed the company into an international operation serving well-known clients such as Dropbox, Electronic Arts, and Wish. The company’s Workforce Optimization platform functions as an addition to existing customer service center management tools like Zendesk and Salesforce Service Cloud, enabling management to oversee digital channels and offer customer service agents feedback to enhance their performance.

“When contacting a company’s support team, you might hear that ‘your call may be recorded for quality and training purposes.’ Playvox provides the technology that operates behind the scenes of [the customer service system] to manage the team responsible for delivering a positive customer experience,” Giraldo clarified. However, instead of focusing on phone calls, it concentrates on chat and email communications.

Giraldo conceived the idea for the business nine years ago while working as a software engineer in Argentina. During visits to various customer service centers, he noticed a significant number of dissatisfied employees. He envisioned a company that would provide these employees with more constructive and encouraging feedback.

“Rather than the conventional customer service quality assurance approach, which often penalized agents [for errors], we utilize data to train them through an integrated learning management system and provide coaching tools that allow our clients to offer agents prompt feedback, enabling them to improve their performance,” he explained.

The acquisition of Agyle Time allows the company to broaden its capabilities beyond the feedback system and incorporate customer service workforce scheduling, positioning it to compete in the enterprise market with a more complete suite of tools. “By combining Playvox’s quality management and agent optimization tools with Agyle Time’s workforce management capabilities, we will offer a distinctive solution in the market,” Giraldo stated.

Five Elms Capital typically invests between $4 and $40 million in companies generating between $2 and $20 million in revenue. The firm favors SaaS businesses in less common locations, with existing portfolio companies in Fayetteville, AK, Columbus, OH, and Brisbane, Australia. Playvox aligns well with this investment strategy.

“Playvox consistently delivers exceptional products, attracts prominent brands as customers, and recruits talented executives due to its strong company values and culture,” said Ryan Mandl, managing director at Five Elms Capital, in a press release.