Crescendo Secures $50M Funding and Acquires PartnerHero to Revolutionize AI-Powered Customer Service

Crescendo Closes $50 million in Total Financing with Latest Round Led by General Catalyst

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 02, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Crescendo, creators of the first augmented-AI customer experience (CX) platform, today announced the closing of a series of venture round financings totaling $50 million. General Catalyst, where the company was conceived, led its latest Series C fundraise. Other investors participating include Celesta Capital, Alorica and strategic angels. The company was valued at $500 million post this investment. "This company is moving at the speed of AI and growing fast," said Andy Lee, Chairman of Crescendo and founder of one of the market's largest service providers who saw an opportunity to reshape a half-trillion dollar industry. Rather than selling conversational AI software alone, Crescendo created an Augmented AI solution that delivers unrivaled accuracy and quality using humans-in-the-loop. By owning the entire interaction, Crescendo can deliver a superior customer experience quickly by charging customers by outcome, not the industry-standard hourly rate or headcount model. Less than one year old, Crescendo has already scaled its operations to six continents by acquiring PartnerHero, a leading customer operations outsourcing provider. Crescendo's innovative augmented-AI platform has been in production deployment since late 2023 with zero customer downtime to date. "Crescendo aligns perfectly with our focus on companies disrupting large industries by accelerating the adoption of emerging technologies like generative AI," said Sriram Viswanathan, Founding Managing Partner at Celesta. This unique business model was originally conceived by Crescendo President and co-founder Anand Chandrasekaran while he was a Partner at General Catalyst, along with General Catalyst CEO and Managing Director, Hemant Taneja. "Our value proposition is to offer a full stack contact center solution with outcome-driven pricing," said Chandrasekaran. "That proposition was driven by our insight that AI offered a unique 'why now' moment to address the 20-year misalignment in the contact center industry in how it serves and charges customers. We believe this could be one of the most meaningful technology innovations in contact centers in over two decades." General Catalyst has remained heavily involved in the rapid growth of Crescendo since first incubating the concept and backing the company. GC has also previously spawned successful companies like Kayak, Demandware and Livongo. "Crescendo represents a whole new paradigm in customer experience platforms with its ability to deliver significantly better service through AI while ensuring quality control and learning from every transaction with human experts," said Taneja. "We believe in the unique Venture Buyout Model (VBO) pioneered by General Catalyst, which Crescendo embodies, enabling them to accelerate their model significantly faster and bring more applied AI to enterprises sooner." About Crescendo Crescendo developed the world's first augmented-AI customer experience (CX) platform that combines the power of AI with human domain expertise to deliver outcome-driven results for fast-moving, digitally-native enterprises growing quickly. With its unique approach, Crescendo offers scalable solutions that optimize both frontline and back office operations, helping companies create meaningful, personalized customer experiences. SOURCE: Statista, March 2023 Media Contact Lonn Johnston for Crescendo [email protected] +1.650.219.7764 Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs

Crescendo raises $50M for its AI-powered customer service platform - SiliconANGLE

Crescendo raises $50M for its AI-powered customer service platform Customer service startup Crescendo today announced that it has closed a $50 million Series C funding round at a $500 million valuation. General Catalyst led the investment. It was joined by Celesta Capital, Alorica and several angel investors. Crescendo, officially CrescendoAI Inc., provides a customer support service that removes the need for companies to set up their own contact centers. The service uses an artificial intelligence assistant, CX Assistant, to field simple inquiries. More complex requests that the AI can't answer on its own are routed to Crescendo's customer service professionals. There are several competing chatbots on the market that can process support tickets without manual input. However, they usually don't provide access to a team of human support representatives, which means companies have to build a contact center team from scratch. Crescendo says that its service removes that requirement and thereby shortens the initial setup process from months to days. The AI assistant at the core of the offering is powered by large language models that companies can train on their internal knowledge repositories. A retailer, for example, could supply the chatbot with merchandise data from its e-commerce catalog. Crescendo can then use that information to automatically answer shoppers' product questions. Companies may customize the style in which the assistant generates responses based on their internal marketing policies. For organizations with an international customer base, Crescendo provides the ability to translate chatbot responses into over 50 languages. Besides answering product questions from online shoppers, the company's platform also supports several other customer service use cases. A software maker could configure Crescendo's AI to help users with troubleshooting requests. E-commerce companies, in turn, can use it to provide package shipping updates and process product return requests. Crescendo's platform ships with a quality evaluation tool that promises to improve the quality of its AI-generated responses over time. Additionally, the software generates a quality score for every customer interaction. If the score indicates that a support ticket wasn't processed efficiently, companies receive an account credit that can be used to purchase customer support capacity. Crescendo says that its platform can save a significant amount of time for contact center teams. According to the company, the built-in AI assistant helps some organizations answer more than 90% of pre-sales inquiries without human input. The software can also process a sizable portion of a company's technical support tickets. In conjunction today's funding announcement, Crescendo disclosed that it has acquired Boise, Idaho-based business services provider PartnerHero. The latter company offers, among others, a customer service service that helps organizations field support requests. "Our value proposition is to offer a full stack contact center solution with outcome-driven pricing," said Crescendo co-founder and president Anand Chandrasekaran. "That proposition was driven by our insight that AI offered a unique 'why now' moment to address the 20-year misalignment in the contact center industry in how it serves and charges customers."

Crescendo Acquires Customer Operations Innovator PartnerHero

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 02, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Crescendo, creators of the first augmented-AI customer experience (CX) platform, today announced the acquisition of PartnerHero, a leader in CX innovation with customers such as Airtable, Khan Academy, sweetgreen, Tom's Shoes, Udemy and more. Price and terms of the deal were not disclosed. The combined companies aim to disrupt an estimated half trillion dollar plus market opportunity. The acquisition is the largest ever in high technology by an early-stage company and the company today also announced that it had raised $50 million in venture funding over the past year. Crescendo assembled a seasoned leadership and proved out its innovative augmented-AI approach to customer experience so that the 20-person company can start to immediately drive enterprise scale through acquisitions, adding over 200 customers and 3,000 human-in-the-loop CX professionals with PartnerHero. For the last twenty years, customer service technology has focused on deflection (making it difficult for customers to reach customer service) as a way to save costs. Now with augmented AI, companies can increase customer engagement while also reducing costs. Uniquely, Crescendo only gets paid by outcomes it delivers - a departure from the multi-decade policy of charging for labor, something that misaligns the interests of traditional CX providers and their enterprise customers. Crescendo shipped its first AI-augmented platform solution in 2023 and since then has experienced zero customer downtime in production. PartnerHero is a recognized industry leader in customer service and now their clients will get access to the premier augmented-AI platform for CX. "We are excited to accelerate the adoption of augmented AI in the customer service industry by bringing together the best AI technology and the best customer service team," said Matt Price, CEO of Crescendo. "Our unique value proposition is that we can increase customer engagement and lower costs by offering a full-stack solution. PartnerHero sets the gold standard for customer service. We're delighted to bring augmented AI to a much larger audience. And for CIOs, they can show immediate ROI on AI investments." A key insight shared by both companies is that if you want to deliver the highest quality of service you need the well-orchestrated combination of AI and humans. AI frees up human agents to focus on more complex and high-value problems. "While our competitors have struggled to adapt to the rise of AI in customer experience, PartnerHero decided early on to lean into the change," said Shervin Talieh, CEO of PartnerHero who will join the leadership team led by Crescendo CEO Matt Price. "In Crescendo, we found a partner who accelerates our transformation toward blended software and services, enabling outcome-based models for our customers. This unlocks new opportunities not only for the world-class brands we support but also for our thousands of global employees who will play a leading role in this evolution." Crescendo delivers a full-technology stack combining the most advanced Large Learning Models (LLM) with proprietary technology to ensure quality and accuracy of all customer interactions. As a result, customers are able to go into production in as little as two weeks without the risk of "hallucination" which has been a problem with many AI technologies. About Crescendo Crescendo developed the world's first augmented-AI customer experience (CX) platform that combines the power of AI with human domain expertise to deliver outcome-driven results for fast-moving, digitally-native enterprises growing quickly. With its unique approach, Crescendo offers scalable solutions that optimize both frontline and back office operations, helping companies create meaningful, personalized customer experiences. Media Contact Lonn Johnston for Crescendo [email protected] +1.650.219.7764 Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs