Markus Waghubinger, born and raised in a small village in Upper Austria. I currently live in Linz, Vienna, and San Francisco. My professional journey began in banking, where I worked as an account manager, investment professional, and later staff manager for strategy and project management. My startup journey started with an idea from my time in the bank, which we developed with Erste Group and CONDA, now known as fundnow.
I then took on fractional roles in startups, twice as interim CFO, and consulting jobs mainly for banks and insurance companies. When the pandemic hit, HalloSophia started as a volunteering project to help small businesses negotiate with banks and assist with grant applications. The technology we built for online consultations became the foundation for HalloSophia as it exists today.
I felt confident in my understanding of banking, I wanted to create new things. Initially, I tried within the bank, but it lacked the necessary dynamics. I got restless until I met the founders of N26 and had my “oh, I could do this as an entrepreneur” moment. I never thought about building things from scratch because it wasn’t an option in the banking environment. But once I started, I realized it was in my DNA, and I loved the freedom to create, but also to support others’ visions through fractional roles.
“Hallo, sophisticated advice”. Our mission is to make professional services accessible to everyone. We think services are broken today. Traditional service providers act inefficient and digital alternatives usually only cover the basic needs. With a HalloSophia integration SaaS can upgrade to full-service and offer even personalized services at scale.
Today, we mainly achieve this through our hybrid service platform, which allows digital companies to create service chatbots with our framework and combine them with professional services integration. Imagine managing your books and creating your tax report with an AI-powered SaaS. The AI detects that you might want to talk with a tax advisor specializing in your field. The AI coordinates everything, so you and the expert join the meeting well-prepared, removing the overhead of professional services while maintaining personal interaction. This integration and facilitation are HalloSophia’s core today. We also power various digital professional services, like tutoring portals for universities, service centers for chambers of commerce, and mentoring platforms for incubators.
Our unique approach integrates human expertise into systems where creators might not consider the human factor until users demand assistance beyond software support. Other support solutions usually only connect you to the next available inhouse service people or to call center agents, with us, users have access to the most qualified people from the whole network of the SaaS company.
We offer out-of-the-box solutions covering everything from first-level assistance with custom AI to scheduling, payment, identification, video rooms, reviews, direct client-advisor connections, and effortless offer/acceptance processes.
Our happiest customers are those who started building similar solutions and realized it’s not easy to cover all aspects of human integration in digital channels and then got everything they needed by building on our platform.
Our target group is SaaS providers. Software-as-a-Service covers many fields where users need to leave the platform and call a consultant for special cases. We empower SaaS to become hybrid service providers and keep customers for all cases. Currently, we reach them through personal sales at networking events, but we’ll start our first marketing campaigns soon. Call us if you know how to do that