Replicant, a San- Francisco based company that works on the idea of using AI chatbots in customer service, has raised $27 million in Series A funding. On Thursday, the company announced that the round was led by Norwest Venture Partners and insurance firm State Farm’s venture arm, with participation from investors such as Atomic, Bloomberg Beta, and Costanoa Ventures participated in the $7 million seed round of the company last year.
With the rise of AI in so many areas, speech recognition and natural language processing have become a fascinating field with applications such as smart voice assistants like Alexa and Siri. Founded in 2017, Replicant has taken this technology to another level by introducing its software to work as text-based chatbots and AI assistants for customer service. The bot can talk to humans over the phone in a natural, human-like voice and completely resolve specific customer service queries. A human manages complex issues that cannot be handled by the AI. It uses deep learning algorithms to speak and answer like humans. It saves time as well as the manpower. It’s not entirely human, but the experience is similar to talking with a customer care agent.
According to the company, they handle around two million customer service calls every month. They have more than 20 enterprise customers, including Xenial (a technology stack for enterprise restaurants ), Burger King, and Wendy’s. The company’s business has increased 15 times since the start of 2020.
Replicant will use the recently raised funds towards their go-to-market strategy and improve their voice AI, increasing its accuracy and resolving more types of customer queries. According to the company, they don’t want Replicant to be a completely autonomous call center. They want to partner with other businesses as their goal is to improve the quality of customer service calls everywhere.
Consultant Intern: Currently in her third year of B.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology(IIT), Goa. She is an ML enthusiast and has a keen interest in Data Science. She is a very good learner and tries to be well versed with the latest developments in Artificial Intelligence.
