Enterprise Conversational AI Startup Yellow.ai Raises $78 Mn

Customer experience automation platform Yellow.ai — formerly known as Yellow Messenger — has raised $78.15 Mn in Series C, led by WestBridge Capital along with Sapphire Ventures and Salesforce Ventures.

This round comes after the startup’s Series B round led by Lightspeed in April 2020, when it raised a total of $24 Mn, bringing the total funds raised so far to $102.15 Mn.

The company, which competes with the likes of recent unicorn Gupshup, Reliance-owned Haptik, Verloop and others, aims to strengthen its leadership in 50+ countries, including India, Southeast Asia, UK, Middle East, and Latin America, and establish a strong presence in the US. It aims to infuse the fresh capital to deepen investments in global expansion, hiring top talent across regions, and applied R&D in hyper-automation. 

Since its last funding, Yellow.ai claims to have grown 470% in recurring revenue and secured hundreds of new customers. It now aims to expand its prowess to automate end-to-end commerce, marketing, HR, and ITSM.

Founded in 2016 by Raghu Ravinutala, Rashid Khan and Jaya Kishore Reddy, Yellow.ai is a conversational customer experience automation platform that enables enterprises to leverage its proprietary natural language processing (NLP) engine and platform to build chatbots and voice bots in more than 100 languages and across 35+ channels. It deploys artificial intelligence (AI) to help enterprises automate customer support, customer engagement, conversational commerce, employee experience and more. The startup’s platform has integrations with enterprise applications like Salesforce, Shopify, Cisco, Avaya, SharePoint, and more. 

According to an Inc42 report, the conversational AI market will reach $15 Bn by 2024. The growth would largely be fuelled by the changing consumer preference for AI-powered customer service, positive ROI on deployed AI-enabled conversational solutions, and an increasing number of providers in the market.  

Yellow.ai is building CX automation with a platform that not only addresses inbound customer support requests instantaneously but also enables businesses to engage customers across any channel proactively. 

Elaborating on the startup’s USP, given the healthy competition in this arena, particularly given the $340 Mn raised by Gupshup this year to target massive adoption, Yellow cofounder Ravinutala said the automation-first approach with a human-assist model helps deliver higher customer satisfaction and incremental revenue growth. 

In measures of learning and training, the startup claims its NLP engine outperforms well-known vendors in the market by an average of 28%, even with 50% less data input. 

The NLP engine also allows bots to be trained in multiple languages without the need for any translation, the company added. This allows enterprises to enable automation up 60% quicker in the first month and thereby derive more value from the investment in automation. In terms of the target customer base, Yellow.ai’s focus is on enterprise businesses that have a larger volume of customers to manage. The likes of Domino’s, Sephora, Hyundai, MG Motors, Bajaj Finserv, Food Panda, Bharat Petroleum, Waste Connections US and Tata Group are said to use its services.