LYON, France – February 2024
Fluid Topics, the leading Content Delivery Platform for product information, announced today the successful completion of its Series B funding round. Kennet Partners, a growth equity investor focused on capital-efficient companies, has invested €15 million in the company to reinforce Fluid Topics’ premier position on the market by scaling operations across the United States and leveraging the potential of artificial intelligence in customer support applications. Existing investors include Ventech, the pioneering pan-European early-stage VC, and Credit Mutuel Innovation.
Founded in 1999 by Fabrice Lacroix, Fluid Topics pivoted in 2014 when it launched its Content Delivery platform, reinventing how people search, read, and interact with product documentation. “For complex products, documentation often runs to tens of thousands or even millions of pages. This makes it extremely difficult for maintenance and repair technicians to find their way around. Fluid Topics has revolutionized customer support by guiding technicians to the information they need at any stage of their service calls”, explains Fabrice Lacroix, CEO of Fluid Topics.
Specifically, Fluid Topics’ SaaS-based platform unifies all product knowledge from a company: technical documentation, datasheets, marketing material, multimedia and more. It then delivers it as actionable information tailored to the user in a contextualized, personalized, and secure way, via business applications and digital communication channels.
A global enterprise customer base
Having developed almost exclusively internationally, Fluid Topics now generates 60% of its sales in North America and 40% in Europe, particularly in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and the Nordics, with steady annual growth of over 45%. The company is serving a prominent customer base, including Fortune 500 companies and industry leaders such as Liebherr, Siemens, Johnson Controls, and Teradata. Over the past years, Fluid Topics has become the go-to solution for tech companies of all sizes seeking to enhance user self-service, case deflection, customer support, and field service operations with distinctive business applications fueled by product knowledge.
The funding aims to maintain the growth rate achieved by Fluid Topics in recent years. The company expects to increase sales to over 25 million euros in the next 3 years, while its workforce plans to grow from 80 to 150 employees by 2027.
This growth will be supported by opening a US team in 2024, whose mission will be to target the SMB market, which is more difficult to address from France.
Virtual assistants to guide technicians
The integration of Generative AI is the second major area of development. Artificial intelligence offers major opportunities for applications based on product content and strengthens the market position of Fluid Topics which has over 20 years’ experience in semantic search, natural language processing, and content governance. Specifically, Generative AI will enable virtual assistants to guide technicians while working on products, and answer their questions, even the most complex ones.
“Fabrice and the team have built an exciting business in a highly capital-efficient manner. We have been impressed by Fluid Topic’s strong financial performance and high-quality enterprise customer base. We are very excited to be partnering with the company to help it scale in the US and to further capitalize on the opportunities that AI enables,” said Hillel Zidel, Managing Director of Kennet.
Cillian Hilliard, Director, and Hillel Zidel, Managing Director at Kennet, will join Fluid Topics’ board of directors, alongside current members Claire Houry, General Partner at Ventech, and Maxence Valero, Investment Director at Credit Mutuel Innovation. Eric Barroca, founder and former CEO of Nuxeo, a Content Services platform for which Kennet helped accelerate the growth trajectory between 2016 and 2021, will also be appointed as an independent board member. Barroca’s successful development of Nuxeo and deep expertise in AI will further strengthen Fluid Topics’ commitment to strategic expansion.
“This funding round empowers us to accelerate in a market shifting rapidly towards solutions that transform operations and enhance competitiveness. As the leading platform, we take pride in offering cutting-edge technologies with utmost attention to security and seamless implementation,” said Fabrice Lacroix, CEO of Fluid Topics.
About Antidot:
Antidot is a SaaS company that leverages over 20 years of advanced research in semantic search, artificial intelligence, and content accessibility to develop Fluid Topics, the leading Content Delivery Platform for product information.
Fluid Topics unifies product content from all existing sources and delivers it as actionable information tailored to the user and situation. Serving Fortune 500 companies and tech organizations of all sizes, Fluid Topics is the go-to solution for tech companies seeking to enhance customer service and field service operations with distinctive business applications fueled by product knowledge. For more information, visit www.fluidtopics.com.
