EIE is an Investor Readiness Programme that offers the most advanced start-ups and scale-ups the opportunity to undergo an intensive programme to make them investor ready. This programme culminates at our technology investor showcase, where we bring together our cohort of incredible companies with international investors. Please purchase your tickets here for this year’s showcase taking place virtually on 6th October 2022.
As we lead up to the showcase, we are pleased to offer you an in-depth look at the companies in our current cohort.
The cohort for EIE22 comprises of the most innovative companies spanning multiple sectors of interest, and in this new series of stories, we will feature companies that will be pitching for investment at the investor showcase in early October.
Our second feature is on indigo.ai, whose founders seek to de-mystify the complexities of customer communication for companies that are relying on good customer communication as the bedrock of their success.
Leveraging the infinite potential of AI
Gianluca Maruzzella, CEO of indigo.ai and a management engineer by trade, believes customer communication is critical to company success. However, he notes, the process of communication is not that easy.
“I’ve seen companies spending billions of euros by perfecting their services, their product, their operations, their value proposition,’ he says. ‘But none of that matters if they’re poorly interacting with their users.”
That’s why he and his other four co-founders are working on building out indigo.ai, a full-service conversational platform that does not require code, and hence, is accessible to everyone.
The idea for indigo.ai came to Maruzzella and his co-founders from an unexpected source.
They first met at the Polytechnic University of Milan. They decided to build this conversational AI tool that indigo.ai offers, specifically after finding there was a true lack of communication between the administration office at the University and its students.
It was the breaking point for Maruzzella, who was finding it more and more frustrating to reach the administration office. It was the breaking point through which indigo.ai was born.
The co-founders believe their platform can help companies deliver the best customer experience they can through the potential that AI promises. It has nothing to do with the technology that makes virtual assistants so poor, explains Maruzzella. Poor virtual assistants on the market are simply poorly designed, he says, and indigo.ai fixes that issue.
Using an advanced set of tools, it also allows companies to access insights from business conversations, which can prove useful in learning about customer needs and desires and what they think of your product or service.
To be data scientists, without being data scientists
This no-code feature on the Saas platform built by the indigo.ai team allows practically anyone to design and build chatbots, scale AI applications, analyze conversational experiences to create a smooth communication process between company and customer.
“This platform allows you, or anyone,’ he says, ‘to easily build custom deep learning models in the Conversational AI space. In a way, to be data scientists, without being data scientists! The platform is a way to easily input data and the more data you share, the higher the performance. The machine is learning. It’s reading and then it’s able to answer.”
Unlocking potential in the tech landscape
The choice to apply for EIE was an easy one for the co-founders.
“Considering that – for R&D purposes – our goal would be to stay close to the University of Edinburgh and that we already have two big references in the UK, we will move the HQ in Scotland to accelerate our growth and international development. To do so, we need funding and with our participation in EIE, we expect to gain a fast lane to the Scottish investor ecosystem,” says Maruzzella.
The co-founders believe Edinburgh will help indigo.ai grow and gain the traction it needs to show the world what it can do.
“If the UK represents the biggest market for us, both on customers and funding perspective, Edinburgh is the right place for Indigo.ai to compete on a global landscape… EIE Is the perfect way to easily and boldly step into the Scottish tech ecosystem.”
You can purchase tickets now to watch indigo.ai and our 35 other companies in the EIE22 cohort presenting to investors and pitching for investment at the premier showcase taking place this year on 6th October.
EIE is delivered by The Bayes Centre, the University of Edinburgh’s innovation hub for data science and artificial intelligence.