Perhaps no industry is more vulnerable to AI takeover than the contact center industry — and VCs appear to agree.
ImprisonedAI-powered cloud contact center startup raises $76 million in Series D funding, led by Sapphire Projectswith the participation of recent investors KeyBank AND Pacific Ionand current investors GV, Little Perkins, Citi Ventures, DCM Projects AND Ericsson’s ventures.
The money injection values the company at $500 million, based on Bloomberg.
The San Francisco-based startup’s platform enables customers to make use of generative AI technology to deliver “more efficient, hyper-personalized customer experiences at enterprise scale,” based on the company. release.
“Generative AI has moved beyond being an experiment or a chatbot replacement exercise to becoming a catalyst for leapfrogging CX improvements,” said co-founder and CEO Anand Janefalkar said in a release. “Human-sounding conversations alone are no longer sufficient, as people now regularly communicate via chat or voice conversations overlaid on rich media. With generative AI, we can transform these conversations into high-bandwidth, visual, and contextual interactions.”
Founded in 2015, the company has raised $177 million, based on Crunchbase.
Ripe for disruption
Contact centers and customer service are obvious applications for the ever-improving conversational AI technologies that are being produced. More AI means fewer people needed to reply or route calls, and even perhaps greater efficiency for the large corporations that use it.
That’s probably why investors have funded a variety of startups this 12 months, similar to AI level, Talk about it and several others that received investments this 12 months.
There is no reason to expect these transactions to finish.