Information Venture Partners Welcomes Flybits to the Family

When we met Hossein last summer, we were immediately impressed by him and his startup, Flybits. As the Founder and CEO with numerous patents to his name, Hossein is whip smart. A machine intelligence thought leader with an extensive technical academic background with Ryerson University and at MIT Media Lab, Hossein is one of those rare entrepreneurs that can also seamlessly and effectively transition to the boardroom and advance his vision for the company in front of the world’s most seasoned executives.

As a firm, we believe customer engagement is evolving from being impersonal and transactional to being contextualized for each customer and engagement-oriented. Starting with direct mail campaigns, the production of which was fueled by the advent of computers and printers, led to a delivery of promotional content to anyone who had a physical mailbox. This was a highly impersonal and transaction-oriented approach, and details around its efficacy were fuzzy at best. With the Internet and email, web marketing automation pioneers relied on historical user behaviour (such as web tracking, other metadata) to deliver promotional content in very high level, generic user segments en masse. This was a step in the right direction, but not the end goal.

Now with the ubiquity of smartphones, using real-time mobile information on a user and proprietary customer data from the enterprise (such as CRM data), the Flybits SDK and Experience Studio allows enterprises to deliver the richest, most dynamic mobile experiences and present the right information to the right user at the right time. In fact, TD Bank, Bouygues and other large organizations are already using Flybits to transform its mobile experience and effectively engage with its millions of users and customers in a highly contextualized manner.

Financial services is a perfect use case for the platform. Less than 20{0573984a2b8f609c30111d9663e55dcffe5bf46757f544e848868cbca776ed36} of banking transactions involve a personal interaction in a branch. With Flybits, the FI can engage their customers in a personalized manner as well as was done, face to face, only a few years ago. Flybits is and will continue to change the way financial institutions (and other enterprises) engage with their customer.

Information Venture Partners is extremely pleased to announce that we have led a Series B investment in Flybits. The financing will be used to further expand the sales, marketing and engineering teams of the company. Flybits represents our fifth investment from IVP Fund II.

Flybits is a unique example of an Enterprise SaaS platform company that is vertically focused and bringing needed innovation to financial services and other organizations.

We are very excited for what’s ahead.

Rob