Touchstone Innovations pours £1m into Resolver website

Touchstone Innovations announced on Tuesday that it participated in a £2.9m funding round in Resolving Limited, the parent company of Resolver.co.uk, an independent website dedicated to consumer rights and complaint resolution.

The AIM-traded firm confirmed it committed £1.1m to the round, alongside co-investor Draper Esprit.

As a result of the investment, Touchstone Innovations will have an interest of 8.1% in the company.

Founded in 2014 and based in London, Touchstone’s board said Resolver.co.uk is a website dedicated to making it easier for consumers to make complaints or raise issues with brands, companies and organisations.

Users can sign up via the website or the brand’s smartphone apps to create a case and send it to the more than 30,000 companies, brands and organisations in the Resolver database.

The company was also working with the London School of Economics to analyse data within complaints, assess the severity of those complaints at scale and attach a severity index to each complaint.

That research could be used to rank large volumes of complaints.

Touchstone said the website was growing at a rate of more than 10% month-on-month and was now the UK's leading web property for complaint resolution, with 665,000 registered users and more than 700,000 visits each month.

The site now raised an average of 3,000 new cases on any given day.

To date, Resolver.co.uk had seen 65% of cases offered a resolution and had resolved £80m of issues, with top issues including banking, travel and flight delays, both bricks-and-mortar and online shopping, telecoms, utilities and dining out.

The new funding would allow Resolver to expand its team and invest in new technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, helping to predict the outcome of a customer case.

That would allow the company to automate key processes to increase the speed at which cases could be raised, and also to help predict the likelihood of successful resolution.

“Resolver is working to transform consumer rights and complaint resolution by automating the process for the benefit of both consumers and businesses,” said Touchstone Innovations director of technology ventures Jon Edington.

“The company has made fantastic progress since its creation two years ago and we are delighted to back founder James Walker and his team.

“We are looking forward to working with Resolver to grow its user base and increase its breadth of offering, not only for consumers, but also for the thousands of companies in Resolver's database that use its services to improve customer service and understand how well their own companies and organisations are performing.”