Tone Raises $4M to Help e-Commerce Brands Text with Their Customers

While lots of companies are using chatbots and other kinds of automation to handle their communication with customers, Boston-based Tone is betting that humans will stay an essential part of the equation.

“The standard designs of bots and human beings are, ‘Hi, I’m a bot, now you get to battle with me to lastly get to a human,'” said Tone CEO Tivan Amour. “Our version of that is, ‘I’m a human using AI to get you the answers you require faster.'”

Amour and his co-founders Vlad Choose and Kyle Weidman formerly developed a bicycle startup called Fortified Bike, and he stated they “determined that the very best way to close our clients on these $750 to $1,000 orders was to in fact engage them in text message conversations.”

After all, when it comes to “high consideration” purchases like bikes, individuals normally wish to discuss their questions and worry about another person. Over time, the Fortified group developed what Amour said was a “semi-automated system” to help its sales team stay on top of these conversations.

“We started bragging to our friends about it, ‘You have gotta do this, it’s the future of mobile commerce,'” he remembered. “And they’d state, ‘Okay, that’s cool, however, we do not have any of the systems of doing that, we don’t have the salespeople.'”

So after offering Fortified Bicycle, Amour and Select produced Tone to assist any e-commerce organization manages comparable text conversations. Tone uses its own group of human representatives to in fact do the texting, helped by software that assists them to find the details they need.

It integrates with e-commerce systems like Shopify and Magento, and it’s already working with more than 1,000 brand names like ThirdLove, Peak Style, and Usual Wines– which are viewing as much as a 26% boost in revenue and a 15% boost in order size.

Amour also noted that particular Tone representatives are appointed to specific brand names, which implies that consumers will be speaking to the exact same individual whenever they have a concern for that business. In some cases, customers have been speaking to the exact same representative for months or years. (Update: Tone clarified that this isn’t a person, but a single personality that’s probably an amalgamation of several agents.)

“Particularly in a post-COVID world, it’s quite clear that online shopping has ended up being the dominant kind of shopping, but I believe no one has considered how you replace that human experience that you get in traditional retail,” he stated.

Tone is announcing today that it has raised $4 million in seed financing led by Bling Capital, with participation from Day One Ventures, One Method Ventures, TIA Ventures, and executives from Google, Facebook, Dropbox, and Uber.

With the new financing, Amour said Tone will have the ability to build out the “relationship automation” element of the item. He also recommended that the platform might ultimately expand beyond text messaging, however, it sounds like that’s not a big top priority.

“In theory, we’re a conversational sales platform more than we are an SMS business,” he stated. “Nevertheless there are a bunch of trends today [such as the development of mobile commerce] that make SMS the most obvious place for this sort of innovation.”