Published in The Business Post, April 2022
Story: Emmet Ryan
Voxxify uses machine learning to survey staff of large organizations on all of the IT they use at work, both hardware and software, to aid the business in purchasing decisions.
The business currently has ten staff and was founded in October 2018. To date it has raised €750,000 in funding, with investors including Brian Caulfield, venture partner at Molten Ventures (formerly Draper Esprit).
“We take all feedback, use machine learning (ML) to analyze it, and give it to the CIO [chief information officer] to help them make informed decisions. We send out a survey designed to feed ML algorithms that gets a shedload of information that can be used to make quick decisions,” Steve Fleming, founder and chief executive of Voxxify, told Connected.
“I spent ten years in EMC and Dell, and a bit before that was with RBS in Edinburgh. If you’re trying to solve the IT problems for 50,000 or 100,000 people, it’s very difficult to talk to all of them.”
While with EMC and later Dell, Fleming built up a system that was the bones of what was to become Voxxify. “I felt there was a way to build it up properly. The Enterprise Ireland New Frontiers programme was like a safety net when I started.”
Voxxify subsequently went through the NDRC accelerator and has since entered the high-potential start-up (HPSU) unit of Enterprise Ireland.
“Primarily we’re selling to companies of 1,000 to 5,000 employees in the US,” Fleming said. “Our largest has 40,000 staff. We’ve recently, as an experiment, started working with scale-ups with just 50 to 200 employees.
“Originally I was only looking at big companies, but then smaller companies wanted to try it out. They weren’t worried about the quantity of information, just the quality.”
The business plans to hire ten more employees over the next year and to raise a bridge round of €2 million before seeking its Series A funding next year.
“We’re primarily focused on the east coast of the US and building out from there,” Fleming said. “Ultimately, we can add value by being in the middle of the conversation between the CIO and end-users, but also to help the CIO make better buying decisions. We give them the actual truth: so far we’ve been getting a good return on investment by telling the truth.
“A year from now we’ll need to double in size in terms of staff. We’ve been able to get by being lean and picking our battles. Brian Caulfield has been advising us on funding. We’ll probably do a bridge round this year and wait until 2023 for a Series A.”
