Surfboard takes in $5 million to bring its teamwork software to the customer support industry

London's Surfboard has attracted $5 million in seed funds for its customer support team scheduling software.

Surfboard was founded in 2021 as a solution for hard-pressed customer support managers who face difficulties keeping teams on track in the age of remote working.

The platform focuses uses data from historical customer support tickets to allocate team members more efficiently, thanks to predictive scheduling insights that run up to 12 weeks ahead of the team's current workflow.

Surfboard's product is designed to integrate smoothly with chaotic customer support workflows; often, it says these are built with a mixture of IT ticketing systems, HR platforms, CX platforms and spreadsheets.

The ticketing system and forecasts in Surfboard are entirely automatic, allowing AI to replace the use of scheduling spreadsheets which line managers need to keep consistently updated.

In terms of integrations, Surfboard says the software works nicely with leading CRM platforms Salesforce, Zendesk, Aircall, Dixa and Intercom. Support is also on hand for automatically extracting time-off data from HR systems, including Google calendars, Personio, Bamboo or Factorial.

Speedinvest led the seed round, with participation from Fly Ventures, Seed Camp, Nomad Capital, Foreword VC, Tokyo Black and Tim Sadler and Edward Bishop from cloud email security provider Tessian.

The round also attracted numerous business angels, namely Felix Jahn (from McMakler), Alex Hersham (Zencargo) , David Nothacker, Nicolaus Schefenacker and Julius Köhler (all from Sennder), Stan Masseuras  (Intercom), Jag Singh and other notable business angels.

Seedcamp was Surfboard's first ever investor back in early 2021, while Fly Ventures has also supplied funds previously.

Natasha Ratanshi-Stein, CEO and founder of Surfboard, said: "Poorly managed scheduling kicks off a vicious cycle of long wait times, lost revenue, employee churn and increased costs.

"Support teams should always be treated as profit centres and it’s impossible to do that without orchestrating your team efficiently and fairly."

Seedcamp managing partner Reshma Sohoni added: "We are impressed with Surfboard’s traction since we wrote their first cheque in early 2021.

"Their timely solution, relentless focus on their ‘surfers’’ well-being and customer satisfaction, as well as their long-term vision, will supercharge customer support and success in a more collaborative and efficient way to the benefit of all parties involved "