[video:https://youtu.be/zv48eU4aBqs]
Last month ShowKit was a finalist in the startup competition at this year’s TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield in New York City - and it is still riding off that momentum today to raise funding and make key hires.
The company uses robust technology to support a simple idea: bring customer support via video chat, screen sharing and co-navigation to the mobile platform. Its software development kit is aimed at major enterprise companies whose developers can then add ShowKit’s functionality directly into their own mobile applications.
Although many compare their solution to Amazon’s “Mayday”—a live support feature available on Kindles that allows customer service representatives to assist users by co-piloting—ShowKit is actually a pioneer when it comes to this space. The creation of this technology and the idea to bring it to mobile devices has been a few years in the making and was no easy feat, says Emily Sipchen, who co-founded ShowKit along with Anthony Kelani and Adrian Bennett.
ShowKit grew from various solutions created for existing customers at the Curious Minds incubator in West Hollywood, but has since been run independently by its three co-founders.
“We figured out that what we built for these internal projects was actually really useful to a lot of people and companies and decided to package ShowKit as a separate project,” Sipchen said.
The company may not have walked away with the top prize at the TechCrunch competition, but just being one of the six finalists has brought about its own benefits, Sipchen said: “That kind of exposure has been great for us. One of our biggest challenges is getting our name out there and getting some credibility to take this type of technology to large, established customers.”
Publicity may not be a major challenge too much longer: since presenting at the Disrupt NYC competition, major companies are now reaching out and trying to build connections. ShowKit was even able to close on an additional $100,000 in funding for its current seed round, which Sipchen attributes to investors seeing their competition pitch. ShowKit is still looking to raise a total of $800,000 in this round of funding and has currently closed $215,000 towards that goal.
The company is focused on closing up this round of funding quickly so that it can continue to build out its product offerings and team of employees.
“Our goal moving forward in the next couple of months is to really build out the team,” Sipchen said. ShowKit currently has five full-time employees, but would like to bring on an Android expert as well as build up their sales and marketing team.
In the future, ShowKit will continue to be made into a more robust platform and possibly expand its mobile services outside of just customer support: “We are not just a toolkit to do live video services we are also a platform. Theoretically, ShowKit could live inside any mobile app, which give us a really interesting opportunity to see what we can do with that,” Sipchen said.
After being in private beta for almost a year, ShowKit launched its software development kit for iOs and had its first release for Web Plugins while at the Disrupt NYC competition. A software development kit for Android is currently in progress and is expected to be available in beta later this summer.
In the meantime, the company looks forward to having conversations with other businesses about potential partnerships and ways to work together to access new customer bases.
“We are happy to be a part of this community,” Sipchen said. “We are doing as much as we can to keep adding to the positive reputation of companies working in tech here in LA.”
