We received funding through Callaghan growth grants, and in late 2018, we completed our $10 million Series A capital round.

Yes, we are almost doubling every year. We’ve been careful to keep our company culture consistent during growth—most simply by implementing our values across every aspect of the business. We have a core belief that valuing our people and ensuring they feel that way is our number one priority. This means doing things differently to a number of other typical business models around leave, flexi working, family and mental health support, remuneration and much more.

We already operate globally, including NZ, Australia, Europe and the US. Our Austin office, due to open mid this year, will even further support our expansion goals.

FaceMe’s digital humans create brand-aligned customer support at reduced cost to serve. They combine the benefits of human interaction and digital communications. So, in a way, they’re most useful as a way to give customers the support they need at scale while providing an exceptional, human-like experience rick in qualities like empathy and warmth. But it’s also a bit more nuanced than that. We’re working with people like Sir John Kirwan at Mentemia to develop a digital human mental health coach, so countless people suffering from mental health problems can get judgement-free support online before, during and after professional care. We’re also working with the Centre for Digital Business in Australia on a cardiac coach, who can support the rehabilitation of people coming out of heart surgery in similar ways. We continue to work with some really big companies on bridging the digital divide between self-service and customer experience. Self-service tools such as chatbots and online forms may be cost efficient, but they erode customer loyalty through lack of differentiation, personalisation and emotional connection. Gartner predicts that within 10 years, 85% of interaction a customer has with an organisation will be digital—only 15% will be with a human—so the digital erosion of the customer experience is only going to get worse. Our digital humans, combined with the natural language processing of a chatbot, create an experience that is memorable, frictionless, and emotionally connected. Available as a platform with simple APIs, any brand or chatbot product company can easily reimagine and create powerful customer experiences that would extend across enterprise, customer service, retail, healthcare, education and Government.

We’ll be heavily focussed on scale, improving the AI technology to better respond to end users and enabling creators to build incredible customer experiences. There is an exciting eco-system forming around chatbots / Digital Assistants which FaceMe is a key part of. We will continue to invest into these partnerships to accelerate adoption of our platform.

We’re excited about digital humans in everyday life. We’re dedicating teams to addressing really hard-to-solve problems in education, aged care, health care, banking and more. Digital humans are making a big difference in taking the burden away from these industries and creating much better outcomes for people.

The reason I said earlier our people have been the biggest highlight for me over the past 12 months is I know what goes into recruiting the best of the best. Having world-leading talent is our biggest differentiator—but it’s not easy.