Conversational AI platform Parloa has secured $66 million in Series B funding, a year after the German startup raised $21 million from a raft of European investors to fuel international growth. did.
The company is particularly focused on the U.S. market, with Parloa opening a New York office last year. The company said the location helped it secure deals with “several Fortune 200 companies” in the region. In its latest installment, Parloa has secured Altimeter Capital, a US-based VC firm known for its previous investments in Uber, Airbnb, Snowflake, Twilio, HubSpot, and more, as a lead backer.
AI and automation in customer service isn't new, but a new wave of large-scale language models (LLMs) and generative AI infrastructure is enabling truly smart “conversational” AI (i.e., not a dumb chatbot). ) is once again attracting investor attention. Established players continue to raise large sums of money, like Kore.ai, which a few months ago completed a hefty $150 million funding round from big-name backers like Nvidia. Masu. Elsewhere, entrepreneur and former Salesforce CEO Brett Taylor, with over $100 million in VC backing, is launching a new customer experience called Sierra built around the concept of an “AI agent.” We have launched the platform.
As businesses seek new ways to improve efficiency through automation, Parloa is well-positioned to capitalize on the “AI with everything” hype that has reached a fever pitch in recent years.
Founded in Germany in 2018, Parloa already has high-profile customers such as European insurance giant Swiss Life and sporting goods retailer Decathlon, which use the Parloa platform to manage email and instant messaging. We automate customer communications such as
But co-founder and CEO Malte Kosub believes what sets Parloa apart is its voice.
“Our strategy has always been centered around the most important and impactful aspect of the customer experience: 'voice first,'” Kosub told TechCrunch via email. “As a result, Parloa's AI-based voice conversations sound more human-like than any other solution.”
Parloa Platform Image Credit: Parloa
Stefan Ostwald, co-founder and CTO He said he has been training models for the to-to-text use case.
“We have trained various speech-to-text models based on telephony voice quality and customer service use cases, and developed custom telephony infrastructure to minimize latency, a key challenge in voice automation. We have developed our own LLM agent framework for customer service,” he said.
To date, Parloa has raised about $25 million, the majority of which came through a Series A round last year. And with an additional $66 million in the bank, it has enough funds to double its growth in Europe and the United States, with Kossab pointing out that revenues have tripled in each of the past three years.
“We successfully entered the US market in 2023. We have always been confident in the excellence and competitiveness of our products, but the overwhelming and rapid success we achieved in the US exceeded everyone's expectations. We exceeded that,” Kossab said.
In addition to lead investor Altimeter, Parloa's Series B round included cash infusions from EQT Ventures, Newion, Senovo, Mosaic Ventures, and La Familia Growth. Today's funding brings Parloa's total capital raised to date to $98 million, following a $21 million Series A funding round led by EQT Ventures in 2023.