Earlier this morning, embargoes were lifted and corks popped to celebrate our $54 million Series B round of funding. This latest round brings us to 80M raised in less than a year, and we couldn’t be more excited to share the news with you. Led by Menlo Ventures, with participation from Next47 Ventures and NGP Capital, this round will allow us to continue our momentum and fuel our next phase of growth as we continue to leverage AI, speech recognition, and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to power the top contact centers of the future.
We’re also pleased to welcome Steve Sloane, Partner at Menlo Ventures, to our board of directors.
“Menlo Ventures has been closely following the transformation of the customer service landscape. We see a massive market opportunity to solve automation, data capture, and collaboration problems that prevent enterprises from delivering the kinds of support experiences that customers deserve,” said Steve Sloane, Partner at Menlo Ventures. “Observe.AI is uniquely using AI to automate tedious customer service workflows and deliver actionable intelligence. We’re thrilled to be leading this investment round and are looking forward to supporting the company’s continued growth and innovation.”
To say we’re humbled is an understatement. We’ve come such a long way from a team of five working out of a home office in Bangalore just under two years ago. It’s hard to believe that today we are a team of 105 Observians strong with more than 150 customers across the globe, including recognizable brand names like Tripadvisor, Root Insurance, Alcon Laboratories, and Pearson. With this funding, we’re doubling down on our recent growth and expanding our team.
A Sincere Thank You To Our Customers & Partners
Of course, we couldn’t have gotten here without the trust and commitment of our partners and customers, including organizations like Talkdesk, Genesys, and Microsoft. We are honored they’ve been with us every step of the way from our time launching out of the Y-Combinator and Microsoft for Start-Ups programs to today where we are seeing 600% year-over-year revenue growth.
"As top brands continue to demand AI-powered solutions to support their frontline agents, automate workflows, and unlock customer intelligence from calls, we are pleased to see Observe.AI continue to gain traction and the confidence of financial markets,” said Shaloo Garg, Managing Director, Microsoft for Start-Ups. “We look forward to leading Observe.AI up-market as they expand their Contact Center AI solution and develop their speech-to-text and Natural Language Processing capabilities with Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services."
Hear What our Customers Say About Observe.AI
How we’re Transforming Contact Centers with AI
For those of you who don’t know us yet, at Observe.AI we use AI to extract information from audio conversations and enable better contact center workflows, such as accelerating the transcription and analysis of 100% of a businesses calls, as well as improving quality management and coaching programs. Our approach has already been powerful for contact centers who typically analyze just 1% or fewer calls for quality and training purposes using very manual, tedious processes, as well as companies who’ve relied on speech analytics solutions that were not built for a pre deep learning area.
Analyze, Evaluate, Coach: See Observe.AI in Action:
Those agents, we believe, are the lifeblood of customer support teams who, in an increasingly digital world, are now becoming one of the only human touch-points brands have to make meaningful connections with customers.
What to Expect Next from Observe.AI
At Observe.AI, we have a mantra we use that guides how we think about our product development and customer success initiatives. At our core, we deeply believe that to provide the world’s best Contact Center AI solution we must be faster, more accurate, and more human in our approach to contact center transformation than any other company in the market.
So what does that mean, and how will that impact what we do next? Let’s break it down.
- FAST: To date, we’ve analyzed more than 10M hours of customer support calls with our Platform. We now plan to do so in real-time and will be using our funding to build out our real-time agent assist capability. That means Observe.AI will enable agents to offer a better customer experience live on calls by surfacing things like the next best action to take, in-the-moment knowledge management resources, and automating tedious processes that prevent agents from focusing deeply on the customer. We will also double down on our one-click integrations with key partners like Talkdesk and Genesys while bringing customers live in 2-4 weeks in an industry where it can sometimes take months to implement AI and speech solutions.
- ACCURATE: We’re very proud of our proprietary speech engine that is delivering transcription accuracies of 90% and higher for many customers. Our system continues to improve over time and our accuracy is being verified as superior to solutions from the likes of Amazon and Google in the customer support industry. We not only understand what is said on a call, but how it is said by considering factors like tonality and customer sentiment. This helps customers uncover opportunities to reduce hold time and supervisor escalations; improve average handle time; and elevate agent performance. Moving forward, we will add omni-channel support and new languages, as well as deepen our automated redaction capabilities to protect customer data on calls and ensure 100% compliance.
- HUMAN: From day one, we’ve always focused on how our Platform can be used to better enable agents. By using AI to power end-to-end quality management and coaching solutions, we’ve used automation to free up more time to celebrate and scale what top performers do best and to offer timely, motivating coaching. We will continue to invest in these areas while offering a user experience that is very easy for all levels of the contact center to adopt. At the same time, we will grow our onboarding and customer success teams to help our customers continue to get the most out of Observe.AI
The Future of Contact Centers = AI + Human
Ultimately, we believe that future contact centers will combine the best of automation and the best of humans. While the voice-based customer service market is $300B today and still growing at 3% year-over-year, it’s no secret that 70% of contact center costs are most often driven by people. While the current economic situation is pushing businesses to adopt AI at an accelerated clip and consider how to streamline operations, we do not believe that humans will be automated out of the equation.
In fact, from our research we estimate that frontline agents will still take about 50% of today’s current calls while playing an increasingly important role in representing brands. We, along with our investors, have identified a $100B opportunity in front of us, and we see a real opening to lead the way in the Contact Center AI market with our values-based approach to building our business.
Building Our Team & Values-Based Business
The road ahead is exciting, but we cannot say enough about the team we’ve built who’ve gotten us this far on our journey.
At Observe.AI we place high importance on our values and company culture. Those values are a commitment to trust, transparency, ethics, integrity, and a deep emphasis on driving more #customerlove. Beyond accelerating our product innovation & R&D efforts, these are also areas where we will focus.
If you haven’t heard, we are hiring across many teams. If you’re interested, now is the time to join us on this journey! Learn more about our open roles here.
Once again, a heartfelt thank you to our investors, partners, customers, and amazing team. We look forward to continuing to make you proud!
Swapnil Jain,
CEO of Observe.AI
Not pictured: Akash Singh, Chief Technology Officer
About Observe.AI
Observe.AI, a leader in Contact Center AI, transforms customer experiences and improves agent performance by helping top brands analyze 100% of interactions, extract actionable sentiment and interaction insights, and streamline workflows. With Observe.AI, businesses transcribe every interaction with high accuracy and coach agents while gaining full visibility into their customer service operations. Observe.AI brings the power of agent assistance, automatic speech recognition, and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to modern contact centers and their frontline teams.
Observe.AI is trusted by more than 160 customers and partners, including National Debt Relief, Root Insurance, Alcon Laboratories, and Pearson. Backed by Menlo Ventures, Next47, NGP Capital, Emergent Ventures, Scale Ventures, Nexus Ventures, and Y-Combinator, Observe.AI’s headquarters is in San Francisco with an office in Bangalore, India. For more information, visit www.observe
About the Author
Swapnil Jain is CEO and co-founder of Observe.AI. Prior to Observe.AI, Swapnil was among Twitter’s first India employees, helping open the company’s offices there and spearheading its first India-based engineering team. Connect with Swapnil on LinkedIn.
