Corporate Gifting Chatbot AI Startup Evabot Raises $10.8M
Conversational AI for corporate gifting startup Evabot has raised $10.8 million in a Series A funding round led by Comcast Ventures. Evabot offers a chatbot service that takes a conversational approach to conjure ideas for companies who want to build and sustain good relationships with clients with more than branded keychains and similar generic promotional items.
Evabot Gifting
Evabot essentially curates ideas for corporate gifts and then comes up with ideas for what might best suit the user’s clients through a chatbot-administered questionnaire combined with data uploaded about the client from enterprise platforms like Salesforce. The AI is more sophisticated than just blindly matching every questionnaire profile to the same gift. It assesses the budget, how the client reacted to previous gifts, and even the environment where the recipient lives. For instance, an overpriced parka sent to a Florida client isn’t likely to make a good impression on a client even as it drains a budget. The AI also utilizes OpenAI’s GPT-3 language model to compose a personalized note that is “handwritten” by a machine holding a pen for each gift. Evabot is both an advisor and a vendor for the gifts, selected from an eclectic mix of direct-market brands; Evabot can therefore select the gift, write a note, package it all up, and send the gift out in the mail automatically.
“We started with a simple idea — that humans love interacting with bots. There is no awkwardness when we do that. We used this insight to build the core concept,” Evabot CEO Rabi Gupta explained in a Twitter thread about the funding. “And then, over the years, we kept on adding layers and layers to create an AI-powered solution that delights not only the gift recipients but also our clients who trust Eva to build these key relationships. Today we serve 1000+ customers, including Fortune 500 companies. 5 years and 150,000 gifts later, we are proud to have built a company and a product that’s changing people’s lives.”
The specificity of Evabot’s corporate gifting conversations doesn’t limit the potentially huge amount of money poured into devising, purchasing, and sending these presents. A Coresight research survey from June estimated a global $258 billion value of corporate gifting this year, with a projected rise to $312 billion in 2025. The $13.8 million Evabot has raised in total is relatively tiny, but the new capital will go toward enhancing the company’s services, adding to its 60-person team, and generally raising Evabot’s profile in the market.
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