A Cairo-based personal concierge app called Elves is not just one of the many in the crowded world of concierge services nowadays. It is among the few of them featured on Facebook Messenger. Founded almost two years ago, by an Egyptian couple, Karim Elsahy and his wife, Abeer Elsisi, Elves generates about 30,000 hits a month. The 40-employee company gives the customers the possibility to ask real human agents for anything travel-related, including lost luggage, hotel bookings, etc. The agents use bots to find the answers and perform transactions.
Although it is a relatively young company, Elves reports about USD 80,000 in revenues per month. Backed up by 15 investors that injected some USD 700,000, the company is now seeking a seed funding of USD 1.25 million.
Facebook’s Zak Fassi met the couple at a business event in Dubai. Shortly after their first meeting, Fassi recommended Elves to the management team in San Francisco. It did not take long to convince them in the bright future of the start up. Moreover, it turned out that the console Elves development team built, was quite similar to what Messenger’s IT team had been developing for the last couple of years. The cooperation with Facebook means that Elves engineering team can access the new features and codes of the social platform. Also, when users from the Middle East open up Messenger, a plus sign redirects them to the Elves app.
The husband and wife are not new to the entrepreneurship. Their first company, E Group Corp, currently employs 250 people across the globe. Elsahy also established Genius Ventures, a venture capital firm that was subsequently purchased by Sawari Ventures. However, they both admitted they preferred to keep their businesses in Cairo because of the lower labor costs for talented engineers.
According to Elsahy, about 60 companies have been featured on the Messenger platform so far. All of them play a great role in the evolving of the app. At the same time, they rely on Facebook for traffic increase. They are also responsible for the high-cost portion of the sales process.
Asked about the risks of working with such a big company and the constant changes Facebook makes on its platform, the couple said they were not afraid. They admitted they referred to their app as an AI learning tool, not a just a concierge service:
There was a lot of hype around bots and then a little disappointment. Pure bots are still failing a lot. It will eventually fail to understand your intent. Where we’ve gotten lucky or smart is using the humans.
Elsahy remembered that when the company started, the human employees were able to chat with three or four customers simultaneously. Now one can take up to 25 customers at the same time which is in line with Facebook’s end team.