Southeast Asia talkbot secures $6m pre-A round

The company raised an angel round of $2.5 million led by ZWC Partners and Insignia Venture Partners last June. K3 Ventures，Welight Capital and Shanghai-listed Jinke Culture also took part.

Wiz's core offering is an artificial intelligence-driven customer service talkbot that can recognize and interact with languages used in Southeast Asia, including English spoken with different accents and Bahasa Indonesian. It is currently developing capabilities in other languages such as Thai.

"Voice interaction is a large sector and Southeast Asia is a fast-growing market, but it has many different languages and each of those is not large enough to capture the attention of any industry giant, that's our opportunity," said Jennifer Zhang, CEO and co-founder of the firm.

Patrick Cheung, founding and managing partner at ZWC, told AVCJ that he discussed with Wiz where best to launch the business before he invested. 

"Indonesia was the only Southeast Asian country that has a large domestic market with a population of 270 million. We were discussing if we should start with Indonesia or Singapore. The conclusion is that Singapore is a better choice for 2B-focused start-ups. Its corporates set benchmarks for the whole of Southeast Asia, the Singapore government is keen to push technology innovation, and the country has a great talent base," Cheung said.

Initially targeting English used in Singapore, Wiz encountered problems not only with various accents, but also the fact that English is often used in combination with many other languages, from Chinese to Malaysian to Indian dialects. "If an engine can recognize 90% of standard English, the accuracy drops to 40-50% in Southeast Asia," Zhang explained.

Wiz put significant effort into filtering and recognizing other languages that crop up in daily English conversation. At the same time, the company stresses that understanding scenarios is as important as providing great technology. For example, numbers and names are very important when dealing with banks. If an engine can be customized to manage this information precisely, it has huge commercial value.

"For key information, you accuracy must be above 90%, for some general-purpose task, maybe 70% is good enough, you must put your effort in the most relevant area to generate the maximum result and solve customer's pain points," said Zhang.

Wiz, therefore, started to provide customized solutions for large corporates. It has accumulated 10 large customers in healthcare, insurance, telecom, banking, and government services in Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia. These solutions have been gradually standardized into some 70 modules, such as appointment management and reception desk services.

These modules form the basis for a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering targeted at smaller customers. These cost as little as a few hundred US dollars and are popular among Indonesian customers.

"Singapore and Indonesia are very different markets. In Singapore, financial institutions must use proprietary services instead of clouds. That means all delivery is customized. But in Indonesia, the labor cost is much lower, and so price is key. If you're too expensive, a human-based solution might be a better choice," explained Zhang.

With the introduction of more standardized modules, Zhang believes that successful customization for large customers rests on delivery rather than product design. The talkbot must connect to customer relationship management (CRM) systems and in-house apps to feed the data into other channels, creating synergies. These connections need additional delivery work.

Meanwhile, Zhang compares product design to the operation of a Subway restaurant outlet. The ingredients are already prepared when the customer enters the store, it's just a process of choosing which ones to include in the sandwich. If a new function is ordered, Wiz must decide whether the effort that goes into customization is worthwhile. "If a customer demands salmon, and from my survey, salmon might be popular with many other customers too, I will add it. If not, I will give up the order," she said. 

ZWC, which is based in Hong Kong and Shanghai, has a local team in Southeast Asia looking at opportunities in innovation. Cheung argues that supporting a local team with Chinese resources is better than simply migrating a Chinese team - and a Chinese investment model - to overseas markets.

For the Wiz investment, ZWC was essentially betting on Jianfeng Lu, a serial entrepreneur who sold a previous business to Qihoo 360 before settling down in Singapore several years ago. He established himself as a Southeast Asia-focused angel investor and is a co-founder of Wiz.

"For many Chinese companies expanding to Southeast Asia, you can see that they have difficulty gaining acceptance locally. We'd like to support local start-ups and we have a local team to do that," said Cheung.

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• Topics
• Southeast Asia
• Early-stage
• Technology
• Greater China
• Singapore
• artificial intelligence
• GGV Capital
• Insignia Venture Partners
• ZWC Partners
• China