Stripe Backs Customer Service Logistics Startup Assembled

Assembled, a tech startup focused on improving processes for customer support teams, has raised $3.1 million in a funding round led by Stripe, according to a report by TechCrunch.

While customer relationship management (CRM) software such as Salesforce or SAP can help manage incoming and outgoing sales activity, there aren’t many solutions on how to help the teams using the software and getting customer feedback.

Many companies just use Google Sheets or a calendar app to answer questions, like when are peak times for calls and who’s best at dealing with what issues.

Assembled works to help with those specific questions and more, and plans to use its new funding to expand. The founding team previously worked at Stripe, according to the report, which noted that Basis Set Ventures and Signalfire also participated in the round.

Co-Founder Ryan Wang said he’s building a company that provides “the logistics of customer support.”

“We want to become the operating system for support teams,” he said, adding that initially the focus will be on agent stats. “Teams want to learn about their top performers and how they spend their time, and offer data to empower their decision-making.”

Stripe has been successful with its ancillary business of funding startups that share common interests to its own. The company has also invested in Gofundme, Grammarly, Harry’s and Hopper.

Wang said the company was borne out of his early experiences working at Stripe, when workers would get together to go through support tickets and discuss the best way to fix problems and concerns. They asked themselves “how do we scale this,” and a new company was born.

“Within the landscape of CRM, we could see that tech hadn’t really been applied to the business of supporting customer support,” Wang said. “That is why we left. We’d understood that it was a broad problem.”

Bob van Winden, Stripe’s head of operations, said Assembled offers a helpful solution.

“Millions of businesses rely on Stripe every day. To support them, we obsess over every detail of delivering fast, reliable customer service, including free 24×7 phone and chat support. This led us to Assembled, which our global support teams are using to stay coordinated and focused on helping Stripe’s users thrive,” he said.