As a customer, it's not fun to interact with a bot when it's clearly a bot that you're engaging with.
Rasa is a startup that claims to have developed an infrastructure that enables developers at large enterprises to build “robust” generative, conversational AI assistants. This makes interactions feel more personal and meaningful to users. The company says it accomplishes this by providing infrastructure, CALM (Conversational AI with Language Models), and a low-code user interface.
The company's technology has helped it acquire many large customers, primarily in the financial services and telecommunications sectors. These clients include two of his top three banks in the world and two of his largest banks in the United States, American Express and Deutsche Telekom.
Founded in 2016, Rasa An open source-based platform for developers to build chatbots, voice apps, and other services powered by conversational AI. since then, The company says Rasa has been downloaded more than 50 million times by developers.
A few years ago, the startup recognized an opportunity to help businesses improve customer engagement. Her CEO Melissa Gordon, an Oracle alum, was brought in to lead her new strategy.gordon, who She competed for many years as a pole vaulter when it wasn't a women's sport and competed as part of the men's team through Title IX, but said she likes to “challenge the status quo.” .
“From the beginning, we have always been proactive about challenging some of the established ideas about how chatbots are built,” said Alan, co-founder and CTO.・Nicole said.
The move appears to have worked for Rasa, with annual recurring revenue (ARR) in 2023 “approximately doubling” compared to the previous year, Rasa said. This traction earned him $30 million in Series C funding. It is co-led by StepStone Group and PayPal Ventures, with participation from existing backers Andressen Horowitz (a16z), Accel, and Basis Set Ventures. The company declined to disclose the valuation, saying only that the valuation was an increase from its original valuation. $26 million in Series B funding.
There's no doubt that this space is hot and getting more and more crowded. TechCrunch reported on Tuesday. sierra – Conversational AI startup founded by Former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor and former Google employee Clay Bavor claim that their software can actually perform actions on behalf of customers.
Nicole said that Lhasa is different. “Agent is not everything””
What these two companies have in common is that they both claim to be addressing issues such as: hallucinationlarge language models may create answers when there is insufficient information to answer accurately.
Rasa claims that it is unique in that companies can “take full advantage of the power of an LLM to understand language in a very nuanced way without being exposed to such risks.” . In other words, he uses LLM to understand users, rather than guessing logic or leading conversations, so businesses can control how the conversation goes and what their bots say. says.
That's a bold claim.
But as a result, Gordon says, the bots that Rasa's infrastructure helps develop no longer feel like branded bots.
“The classic use case is customer-facing workhorse assistants, and typically when these teams come to Lhasa, it's not their first rodeo,” Nicol said. “They're either using another platform or trying to build everything in-house. And at some point they run out of power and are looking for something more scalable.”
Bots have a variety of external use cases, from checking account balances to sending money. At Deutsche Telekom, for example, Gordon points out that a bot can help reset your home's router if you have an internet problem.
Image credits: Lhasa
Notably, this investment marks PayPal Ventures' first investment in AI. Partner Alan Do said in a written statement: “At PayPal, we've seen how Rasa's technology improves customer engagement and business performance through our concierge solutions, and we believe Rasa is the platform of choice for businesses, so we're excited to announce the first We're making AI investments. We're developing robust conversational AI.”