Alibaba invests in Greek-owned startup
Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is betting on the artificial intelligence “assistant” of startup Connectly.ai, as, together with other international investors, it has invested $20 million dollars in the company of Stefanos Loukakos and Yandong Liu.
The main goal of the startup after this investment is to expand further in America and Europe, to strengthen its team – and its base in Greece – but above all to develop AI technology.
“We will continue to train our own AI system. It takes work, capital and good engineers to improve our product. Also, through the cooperation with Alibaba, we are trying to expand all over the world,” Stefanos Loukakos, former head of Messenger Business at Facebook, former general manager of Google and former CEO of Hellas Online, tells Kathimerini.
Currently the company, based in San Francisco, has 70 employees, with the intention of doubling that figure in the coming years. “We want to make Greece a hub, to hire more people.”
Speaking about its technology, he explains that “with the platform we have developed, we help e-commerce companies as well as retail companies to sell their products or services and communicate with their customers on any messaging platform, such as WhatsApp, SMS, Messenger etc, etc. At the same time, we are developing AI assistants through which communication channels are created between companies and clients in order to provide solutions to the client’s problems. On the contrary, often the communication with the well-known chatbots is pointless, without any value,” Loukakos explains.
The startup connects to the company’s back-end and pulls information – which the customer has consented to – about their purchases, preferences etc, and therefore helps retailers tailor the messages their customers receive. “This way the customer can buy a new product, return another one etc,” he says.
“Alibaba is a huge retailer with millions of products in all countries of the world. It is therfore interested in using our own AI assistants so that the retailers included in the platform can talk effectively with their customers.” The company is running at three-digit growth rates.
