Swag has a long and patchy history in the world of business. For every hip pair of plaid socks, there are five t-shirts you may never wear, an itchy scarf, a notepad your kids might use, and an ugly mug; and most of all, likely thousands of dollars and lots of time invested to make those presents a reality. Now, a startup that has built a service to rethink the concept behind corporate gifts and make them more effective is today announcing a round of funding to continue expanding its business \u2014 and one sign that it may be on to something is its progress so far.<\/p>\n
Alyce<\/a>, a Boston startup that has built an AI platform that plugs into various other apps that you might use to interact and track your relationships with others in your working life \u2014 sales prospects, business partners, colleagues \u2014 and then uses the information to personalise gift recommendations for those people, has raised $30 million, a Series B that it will be using to continue building out its platform, signing up more users, and hiring more people for its team.<\/p>\n This round is being led by General Catalyst, with Boston Seed Capital, Golden Ventures, Manifest, Morningside and Victress Captial \u2014 all previous backers \u2014 also participating.<\/p>\n Alyce says that it has grown 300% year-over-year between 2019 and 2020, tackling a corporate gifting and promotional items industry that ASI Market Research estimates is worth around $24.7 billion annually. Its customers today include Adobe\u2019s Marketo, G2, Lenovo, Wex, Invision, DialPad, GrubHub, and 6Sense.<\/p>\n As with so many other apps and services that aim at productivity and people management, Alyce notes that this year of working remotely \u2014 which has tested many a relationship and job function, led to massive inbound and outbound digital activity (the screen is where everything gets played out now), and frankly burned a lot of us out \u2014 has given it also a new kind of relevance.<\/p>\n \u201cAs everyone was flooded with spam last year unsubscribing soared,\u201d Greg Segall, founder and CEO of Alyce, said in a statement. \u201cWhen a prospect opts out, that\u2019s forever. It\u2019s clear that both brands and customers crave the same thing \u2013 a much more purposeful and relatable way to engage.\u201d<\/p>\n Alyce\u2019s contribution to more quality engagement comes in the form of AI-fueled personalization.<\/p>\n Linking up with the other tools people typically use to track their communications with people \u2014 they include Marketo, Salesforce, Vidyard and Google\u2019s email and calendar apps \u2014 the system has been built with algorithms that read details from those apps to construct some details about the preferences and tastes of the intended gift recipient. It then uses that to come up with a list of items that might appeal to that person from a wider list that it has compiled<\/a>, with some 10,000 items in all. (And yes, these can also include more traditional corporate swag items like those socks or mugs.) Then, instead of sending an actual gift, \u201cSwag Select\u201d, as Alyce\u2019s service is called, sends a gift code that lets the person redeem with his or her own choice from a personalised, more narrowed-down list of items.<\/p>\n