Y Combinator-Backed Voice AI Platform Observe.AI Raises $8 Mn From Nexus, Others

Voice AI platform Observe.AI has secured $8 Mn in a Series A funding round led by Nexus Venture Partners to further improve its platform services for its clients worldwide.

MGV, Liquid 2 Ventures, Hack VC, and existing investors Emergent Ventures and Y Combinator also participated in this funding round. Observe.AI was part of the YC’s winter 2018 batch.

Founded in May 2017 by Akash Singh, Sharath Keshava, and Swapnil Jain, the Bengaluru and US-based Observe.AI empowers call centre agents to do their jobs better by providing real-time feedback on customer sentiment and guides them on next best action during the customer call.

Ram Gupta, managing director of Nexus Venture Partners, said, “Companies have been actively discouraging their customers to call their agents for the last two decades because of increasing costs, even though it is a natural way for humans to get help. With the recent advances in deep learning and NLP, which will dramatically increase the productivity of agents, call centres are ready to become the first port of contact again for customer service.”

The Observe.AI platform listens to the call stream in real time, uses deep learning and natural language processing (NLP) to understand the context, and generates suggestions and guidance for the agent.

This means that the call centre agent no longer needs to place customers on hold, or transfer them around; continuous engagement is established until a successful resolution is reached.

“Our agent-first approach is all about making the job of the agent easier which translates into better productivity and higher customer satisfaction,” said Swapnil.

The company also recently partnered with cloud-based contact centre software provider Talkdesk to launch its voice AI platform for Talkdesk customers.

The global AI sector poised to grow to $16.06 Bn by 2022. According to Maruti Techlabs founder Mitul Makadia, the customer service industry is gaining much momentum, especially due to disruption of artificial intelligence.

“Digital market moguls project that by 2020, more than 85% of all customer support communications will be conducted without engaging any customer service representatives,’ he said in his recent article on Inc42 entitled ‘How AI Can Open Doors To Real-Time Self-Service For Online Customer Service Startups’.

Recently, it was also reported that Google’s voice-calling Duplex — which enables artificial intelligence to mimic a human voice to make appointments and book tables through phone calls — may soon enter call centres, assisting humans with customer queries.