Uniphore, a conversational artificial intelligence (AI) platform for customer service call centers, has secured $51 million in a series C funding round to continue to expand its business and strengthen its products. Today, the company offers three key tools to serve call centers—Akeira, a conversational AI assistant, AuMina, a tool that uses natural language processing to gather insights and analytics from customer conversations, and AmVoice, an automated voice authentication technology that pinpoints a caller’s identity to prevent fraud.
Founded in India back in 2008, Uniphore has recently expanded to the U.S., namely Silicon Valley. Its recent funding will help the company grow globally and will partly be used to attract more U.S. customers.
Uniphore's CEO, Umesh Sachdev, said in a statement that the funding was a "milestone" for the company:
“Today’s announcement of our series C funding represents a major milestone for Uniphore and the conversational AI market as a whole. This funding will accelerate our vision to redefine customer service through AI-enabled conversational service automation (CSA). With this new round of funding, we will be able to accelerate our global expansion and better serve our customers by developing and delivering innovative CSA solutions to more organizations around the world.”
As Uniphore continues to grow, the company’s CEO is careful to maintain his stance that AI is not designed to take customer service agents’ jobs. Bots will, however, be able to handle requests that come in during off hours or simple requests that don’t necessarily require human attention, enabling organizations to scale affordably. Although “bringing AI into the call centers is one of the biggest disruptions that we're going to see in the next three to five years in the tech space,” he told Cheddar, humans will remain critical and will help brands differentiate themselves by providing top-notch service.
"This is an industry which has traditionally employed millions of people. Businesses look at this as a tremendous amount of cost in servicing customers, but also a way of differentiating customer experience," Sachdev added.