Argentina’s Numia grabs $3.5 million in an investment round led by Cometa

It is increasingly common for companies with physical branches and online services to use customer relationship management (CRM) software to track all their customer interactions in one place. In Latin America, many companies and banks keep data from physical locations isolated from their digital counterpart. Numia wants to change that.

Numia, a technology company specializing in customer journey management solutions based in Argentina, closed a $3.5 million investment round led by Cometa. Boost Capital Partners, MatterScale Ventures, Kuiper VC and Amador also participated. Also noteworthy was the participation of angel investors Santiago Gómez and Alejandro Casas from Simetrik, a SaaS company that simplifies, scales and automates the financial control of companies.

The platform is vendor-independent and can connect to banking kiosks, tablets and even software such as Salesforce and Genesys. Companies looking to use Numia can choose which integrations they want to connect. The company works with large enterprises in categories including banking, healthcare and insurance, among others.

Gustavo Lauria, co-founder and CEO of Numia, told Contxto that the company was originally founded in 2014 as a queue management software to help companies such as banks and pharmacies manage their physical offices. The company decided to shift to its current strategy in 2020 after seeing that customers were not connecting the data they were getting from their physical locations to their online platforms.

“There was a lot going on offline, and offline was, and still is, a very overlooked area,” Lauria said. “It’s essentially a customer journey manager that basically combines these two worlds, physical and digital, to integrate it seamlessly and be able to manage different customer journeys.”

Lauria explains that bringing all this data together in one place creates more efficient interactions with customers. It makes it easier for companies to connect their customers with human customer service representatives if it makes sense to take an interaction offline. And some tasks that would have been completed by a human representative in a physical branch can now be handled by AI agents.

“We kind of give CRM a superpower, because we made CRM reach further in a way,” Lauria said. “So we asked them to reach further offline, and we connected them online as well. Of course, online, there are more tools; what we offer them is the ability to have it all integrated.”

The company now has more than 350 clients in 10 Latin American countries, including large companies such as Banco Santander, HSBC and Allianz, among others. It will use these funds to strengthen its presence in Mexico and Colombia. The company plans to exceed 400 corporate clients next year.

Numia is profitable and is on track to end the year with between US$4.7 million and US$5 million in ARR booked, Lauria said. He added that the company is looking to double that in the next two years. The company has avoided taking on venture financing in its 10-year history so far.

Lauria said the company decided to raise outside capital so it could approach its potential customers, many of whom are LPs in the venture funds Numia was looking to raise. It also allowed them to get the resources they needed to expand their customer base.

“For us to have all these resources, to be at all the conferences we want to be at, the amount of account executives, we need to be talking to these VPs of banks all the time, and that takes a lot of resources,” Lauria said. “Raising capital was the decision that made the most sense for us.”

The fundraising journey didn’t start out easy, Lauria said, as he found that many investors didn’t understand why the profitable 10-year-old company was raising capital to begin with. However, once Cometa agreed to lead the round, it started to get easier, he said.

The company plans to allocate 70% of the capital to marketing, sales and recruiting, Lauria said, and the other 30% will go to improving and developing technology.

The startup wants to continue to expand its capabilities to offer customers more integration options. It is also looking at improving AI technology to create more efficiencies in the customer journey.