Yellow.ai raises $78M to expand its AI chatbot platform globally

Conversational AI platform provider Yellow.ai today announced the close of an more than $78.15 million series C round led by Sapphire Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, and Lightspeed, bringing the company’s total funding to more than $110.5 million. Yellow.ai says it will use the funds to develop on its current technologies and establish a presence in the U.S., adding 70 personnel to its workforce of more than 500.

With digitalization on the rise, consumer practical experience has grow to be a main competitive benefit for organizations. There’s been a corresponding rise in the adoption of virtual agents as organizations look to more proficiently deal with higher get in touch with volumes with current teams. According to analysts, some enterprises that embraced chatbots for consumer service next deployed them internally, not only to automate consumer interactions but to flag HR issues and possible sales possibilities.

Yellow.ai CEO Raghu Ravinutala grew up in Bangalore, India and worked his way up as an engineer for tech organizations that incorporate Broadcom and Texas Instruments. In 2015, he cofounded Yellow.ai with Jaya Kishore Reddy, Raghu Kumar, Rashid Khan, and Anik Das. A possibility discussion with good friends about poor consumer experiences became the germ for an concept to make a conversational AI-driven platform.

“Every year, over 400 billion calls are made for customer support globally, and out of those, less than 0.1% have any kind of automation solution implemented,” Ravinutala told VentureBeat through e mail. “Over the next 10 years, the scope for implementing AI-powered automation solutions across channels is huge, and as a company we aim to capitalize on the opportunity, with a focus on high quality customer experience. Any enterprise that has over 100,000 customers or over 20,000 calls per month coming to their call center can benefit by deploying a voice bot.”

AI-powered conversations

Yellow.ai’s organic language understanding engine, which trains on billions of sales, marketing and advertising, and employee engagement conversations every month, leverages intent to guide buyers to convert. Using its AI-powered virtual assistants, Yellow.ai says organizations can resolve queries in more than one hundred languages and across more than 35 text and voice channels. The platform tracks trends and analyzes sentiment to enable brands have an understanding of consumer requires, providing resolutions to assistance user experiences and handing off to live agents when important.

“Yellow.ai’s platform allows brands to engage with their customers wherever they are, through conversational virtual assistants … for faster conversions [and] lasting loyalty,” Ravinutala added. “AI can’t replace humans, but automation helps self-serve 70% of queries and seamlessly loop in live agents when needed … it is not just a live agent handover;  it is an active learning loop across bots and humans.”

Yellow.ai claims it currently has live deployments for voice bots across more than 700 organizations (up from 72 pre-pandemic) in telecom, banking, finance, insurance coverage, and governments — such as Amazon, Biogen, and Sephora. Revenue is up 4 occasions compared with last year, with roughly 40% coming from international clientele and 60% from buyers based in India.

“The pandemic brought unprecedented times for every organizations, and no one was ready for a lockdown and elongated work-from-home scenarios. Enterprises had to quickly adapt to ensure business continuity while minimizing redundancy across geographies, establishments, and teams,” Ravinutala stated. “Our growth is driven by continuous product innovation [and the] latest implementations, such as deepening multilingual voice bot capabilities, expanding enterprise integrations, and launching a developer marketplace for virtual assistants. We have been rapidly expanding our footprint across the U.S., Europe, Latin America, Middle East, and Asia-Pacific regions.”

Ravinutala stated pizza chain Dominos moved one hundred% of its consumer service to “Dom,” an omnichannel AI assistant Yellow.ai created for India. Waste Connections, a waste management corporation in the U.S. and Canada, deployed a Yellow.ai chatbot known as Trina for the duration of the early stages of the pandemic. And Bajaj Finserv, a bank based in India, utilised Yellow.ai to turn its insurance coverage division’s consumer assistance into an upselling stream that it stated brought in $one hundred million in 3 years.

“Yellow.ai has broken out of the crowded virtual assistant market with its automation-first, human-assisted model to deliver a higher customer satisfaction and incremental revenue growth to its enterprise clients,” Ravinutala continued. “With our rapid client and revenue expansion across the world, we’re geared to becoming the global leader in the customer experience automation space and are bullish on building our product, partnerships, teams, and community to truly democratize AI in the near future.”

Yellow.ai, which is based in Bangalore, plans to open a San Francisco, California-based headquarters and regional offices in the coming months.

Originally appeared on: TheSpuzz