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About us

Leapfrog into AI‑native customer success

We believe AI should drive revenue across the entire customer lifecycle — not just deflect tickets. Our platform puts a persistent AI agent behind every customer, from first visit to renewal.

Our mission

Complexity made simple

UNLESS, founded by serial entrepreneurs, helps regulated European enterprises move beyond AI pilots by closing the skills gap and removing regulatory friction with end‑to‑end, AI‑native customer success solutions.

We aim to simplify access to the complex information that matters at every stage of the customer lifecycle. Our conversational and agentic AI platform, tailored for finance, healthcare, insurance, and other high‑trust sectors, lets organizations embed fully compliant AI assistants into existing systems to boost customer experience, net retention, and team productivity.

The company is backed by River Venture Partners, Block Party, Rockstart, and several angel investors. Its management currently consists of Marcel Panse as chief technology officer and Sander Nagtegaal as chief executive officer.

“UNLESS was able to launch a service that is helpful to businesses all over the world and gives them a scalable solution with an almost infinite peak capacity”

Werner Vogels, CTO at Amazon
Founded
2017
Employees
8
Accounts
50
Raised
€1M
River Venture Partners Rockstart BlockParty

Backed to build AI‑native customer success

Starting as “teletext.io”, we joined Rockstart’s Web and Mobile program pre‑launch in 2016. We raised pre‑seed funding in 2017 with help from friends and family, and again in 2019 after our full launch as UNLESS—doubling down on AI‑driven customer success for regulated markets.

Advisory board

A group of seasoned professionals provides guidance on strategy, governance, and go‑to‑market, helping us scale AI‑native customer success in regulated Europe. Their experience and varied backgrounds are instrumental in shaping how UNLESS balances innovation with risk and compliance.

  • Sabine van Velsen

    Ex-Google sales leader

  • Christina Caljé

    Former Goldman Sachs Executive Director

  • Herman Kienhuis

    Tech investor

  • Daniel Scheijen

    CMO Pastbook

  • Dave Dirks

    Tech investor

  • Maurice Beckand Verwee

    Tech investor

Frequently asked questions

Unless is an AI platform for regulated enterprises in Europe that focuses on customer success across acquisition, retention, sales expansion, and support. The company helps organizations in finance, healthcare, insurance, and other compliance-heavy sectors launch conversational and agentic AI assistants inside their existing systems to improve customer experience and team productivity.

The mission of Unless is to simplify access to complex, regulated information at every stage of the customer lifecycle. By closing the AI adoption gap in regulated industries, Unless aims to make it easy and safe for enterprises to use AI to support customers and employees in the tools they already rely on.

Unless focuses on regulated European markets because many organizations there struggle to adopt AI due to strict privacy rules, legacy systems, and limited AI skills. The platform is designed with a compliance-by-design approach so banks, insurers, pension providers, and healthcare organizations can use AI confidently under GDPR, the EU AI Act, and other regulations.

Unless helps with AI adoption in customer success by providing end-to-end solutions rather than isolated tools. It offers ready-made assistants and workflows for website visitors, logged-in clients, and internal teams, so enterprises can roll out AI across key journeys like onboarding, renewals, self-service, and ticket resolution without building everything from scratch.

Unless was founded by serial entrepreneurs with experience in building digital products and infrastructure. Today the company is led by CEO Sander Nagtegaal and CTO Marcel Panse, supported by a broader leadership and advisory group with backgrounds in technology, finance, marketing, and enterprise sales.

Unless is backed by investors such as River Venture Partners, Block Party, Rockstart, and several angel investors. A group of seasoned advisors, including former executives from companies like Google and Goldman Sachs, support the team with guidance on strategy, governance, and scaling AI for customer success in regulated markets.

The Unless platform has evolved from a component library with user profiles and integrations into a full conversational and agentic AI platform. Over the years, the team added CRM and portal integrations, open-source components, privacy-by-design features, and large language models to orchestrate unified conversations across websites, portals, and internal tools.

Unlike generic AI tools, Unless is purpose-built for regulated European enterprises and for customer success use cases. It combines conversational AI, AI search, and agentic workflows with strong data governance, auditability, and model control so that digital, success, and risk teams can safely use AI in production at scale.

Unless approaches privacy, security, and compliance with a compliance-by-design architecture that keeps personal data in the EU, filters or obfuscates sensitive information, and controls how data flows to AI models. The platform is built to help enterprises meet GDPR, the EU AI Act, and sector-specific expectations while still keeping AI assistants useful and up to date.

Organizations that work with Unless today include financial institutions, insurance companies, pension providers, and other regulated businesses across Europe. They use the platform to modernize customer success, simplify portals, and give employees AI co-pilots that improve efficiency without compromising compliance.

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We are known for our quick responses if you have an issue. Feel free to ask us anything. But you can also ask our conversational AI a question, of course!

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