Startup Spotlight #32: Pigro

January 6, 2020

Chatbots are artificial intelligence that interact with people in written or verbal ways. Instead of pressing the keys or touching the screen, you are talking about computer problems by speaking or writing. Chatbots are the way machines communicate with people in the language of people. We can list the messaging services as the natural habitat of chatbots. Services such as Facebook Messenger, Skype, Viber are already hosting chatbots. In addition to these services, chatbots can be used in many areas.Web sites and mobile applications can be considered the second home of chatbots. It can be integrated into an existing page/application and can even take over the management of the entire structure. The days we will chat with sites and applications we know are not too far away. Pigro is one of the applications that bring us closer to this future.

What is your first name?

Nicola

Welcome, Nicola! What is your surname?

Abbasciano

Can you type your email?

nicola@pigro.ai

What is the name of your startup?

Pigro

What is the website address of Pigro?

https://pigro.ai

Where is your startup based?

Italy

What are your targeted verticals for your startup?

FintechEnterprise SaaS

Tell us what your startup does.

Pigro is a turnkey helpdesk virtual assistant able to answer users’ questions and to help its human colleagues with the most difficult ones. Companies’ knowledge base already contains the answers to users’ questions in an aggregate form. Pigro retrieves answers automatically providing them through a chat.

Tell us about your team.

Pigro team is made up of different expertise. Nicolò Magnanini CEO, expert developer, the man who has created the Pigro technology, Nicola Abbasciano CCO-CMO, has been working more than 20 years in multinationals’ companies as Samsung and Electrolux, Armando Fontana, architect, CPO and UX expert, Ahmed Nasser CTO with Bachelors’ degree in Computer Science and a Master in Data Science, Stefano Marzani BD e Daniele Galvani CFO, both founders of successful startups.

When and why did you found your startup?

The technology that is today at the base of Pigro was born in 2014. As often happens to create something thinking about a specific application and then discover that it can do much more in different fields. And this is what happened to Pigro: initially, it was an aggregator of news that provided a summary of the most relevant information of the day, avoiding textual repetitions and giving the user a synthesized and effective content.However, the comparison with the market soon highlighted two aspects. On the one hand, the news world was difficult to monetize and on the other hand, a strong trend was emerging from Silicon Valley, the virtual assistants.On July 3, 2018, Pigro entered the LUISSEnLabs acceleration program of LVenture Group, while in January 2019 signed its first contract with an Italian municipality

What are your key and unique features?

Our main competitors are platforms that allow building a chatbot in self-provisioning or companies offering a turnkey chatbot to the customer. But both solutions are using NLP/U technology which implies long set up time and high maintenance costs. Pigro, thanks to its proprietary technology based on a statistical approach, can manage huge dynamic knowledge bases building a chatbot 10 times faster than its competitors.

What is your growth like?

10x 2019 vs 2018

Tell us about the numbers that matter to you.

Rate conversion from meeting to contract: 10%. 1Q 2020 expected revenue 300K euro (2019 total revenue 200K euro).

What are your plans for next year and for the next 5 years?

Expected 2020 total revenue 1 ML euro. From June 2020 business internationalization: June 2020 UK, January 2021 USA, June 2021 Middle East after developing the Arabic language.

Did you receive any investments?

LVenture Group 30k euro in 2018

Tell us 3 startups that excite you, and why?

Zappyrent (short term house rent for students). Very vertical on a crowded market. Betting all on superior user experience for users.ForTune podcast. Trying to launch podcasting in the Italian market. An outstanding challenge.Parcy. A platform for the event managers. They start focusing on USA market very early

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