Yesterday, Kustomer announced a $35 million Series ‘C’ round of capital to go with their 500 percent year over year growth.

We are proud angel investors at Social Leverage (from 2016) and continued to invest in this round. I explained how excited we were (and the reasoning) back in 2017.

Customers using Kustomer software include Ring, Rent the Runway, Glossier, Away Travel, UNTUCKit and Sweetgreen.

Tomasz at Redpoint Ventures summed up the value proposition and mission well with this:

There’s a category of businesses who deeply value the relationship with their customer. They don’t call their customer support agents by that name, but by other words: ambassador, relationship manager, guide, friend, and many other words that better capture the idea that commerce happens between two people. Not one person and a company.

It’s those companies that we strive to serve at Kustomer. By unifying all the information about a customer in one place and providing a platform to act faster, with more knowledge, Kustomer empowers those businesses to fulfill their brand promises.

That segment of companies who value support and customer engagement are underserved by existing platforms and they constitute a very large and growing segment.

I talk about enterprise software public companies a lot on this blog because I have owned many of them for years. The SAAS ecosystem is exploding. Tomasz has the perfect explanation with this chart. Getting to 1% of Salesforce revenue makes your company a Unicorn.

The simplest way for hedge funds and public market investors to be long this customer support category has been Zendesk.

That won’t change tomorrow, but I am sure it will someday soon.