Dixa acquires Melbourne SaaS startup Elevio for $19m

Founded in Melbourne in 2015 by Chris Duell (pictured left) and Matt Trimarchi (pictured right), Software as a Service (SaaS) outfit Elevio harnesses AI to automatically deliver the appropriate user guides and information to solve problems, whether they be from customers, support agents or internal teams.

TechCrunch reports the deal is understood to be worth US$15 million (AUD$19.3 million).

Duell describes integrating with Dixa - a conversational customer service software that lets brands serve customers across multiple channels - as a "natural next step" for Elevio as both companies aim to make customer support less frustrating and more meaningful.

"We started Elevio back in 2015 with the simple vision of enabling customers and support agents with product knowledge," Duell, Trimarchi and the Elevio team wrote in a blog post. 

"Over the last six years we've grown from a team of two to our current close-knit team of 11, and grown to serve 500 customers delivering over 16,000,000 answers every month.

"These companies range from tiny outfits, to globally recognized brands and leaders of industry like Epic Games, eBay, AccuWeather, Loom and TripAdvisor."

They also describe the team at Dixa as "wildly intelligent" and amazing to work with.

"We've quietly been partnering behind the scenes with Dixa for around 12 months on a product that will be released in the near future," the founders and staff wrote.

"So when they reached out to talk about formally joining forces and bringing together Dixa's multi-channel customer support platform and Elevio's intelligent knowledge creation and delivery offering, everything just made sense."

The deal is not expected to have any impact on Elevio customers for the forseeable future. While the technology will be integrated into Dixa's platform, it will continue to operate as a separate product.

"Customer support agents still spend a lot of time helping customers with the same type of questions over and over again," says Dixa CEO and co-founder Mads Fosselius.

"Together with Elevio we are able to ensure that agents are given the opportunity to quickly replicate best practice answers, ensuring fast, standardised and correct answers for customers, leaving them time to focus on building real relationships with them and helping them with what really counts," he says.

"The unique solution Elevio has built will help us provide the right help to end-users at the right time, so that customers and agents spend less time on frequently raised issues, enabling that time to be focused instead on meaningful and personalized interactions - building customer friendships."

Fosselius note putting guides together and building a knowledge base with Elevio doesn't require any technical skills, so people with all levels of technical knowledge can participate.

"It also intelligently suggests updates and additions using machine learning, for example when the content has not been edited in a while, users will receive a prompt. Multi-language support ensures there are no barriers to surfacing the right answer," he says.

"After having partnered with Dixa for two years, as well as integrating with many of our competitors, Elevio knows the customer support solutions market extremely well. They recognised in Dixa a kindred spirit on the same path to disrupt an industry that has been slow to change."

Elevio may be the one being acquired but it has actually been around a lot longer than Dixa, which was established in 2018 but has quickly grown from just 12 to more than 170 employees with offices in Copenhagen, London, Kyiv, Berlin and Melbourne, as well as plans to open offices in New York and Amsterdam by the end of this year.

Dixa's revenues doubled last year and just one year ago it raised US$36 million (AUD$46 million) in Series B funding, taking total funding up to US$50 million (AUD$64.3 million) to date with support from Notion Capital, Project A Ventures and SEED Capital.

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