eSelf Launches AI Platform for Face-to-Face Video Conversational Agents with $4.5M Seed Funding

eSelf Raises $4.5M Seed; Launches Platform for Face-to-Face AI Conversational Agents

TEL AVIV, Israel, Dec. 11, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- eSelf, the platform for businesses to create face-to-face conversational AI agents, announced today the official launch of their solution alongside $4.5 million in Seed funding. The round was led by Explorer Investments, with participation from Ridge Ventures and strategic angel investors, including Eyal Manor, former VP of Engineering at YouTube and Chief Product & Engineering Officer at Twilio. eSelf has already powered millions of real-time conversations, with notable clients including Christie's, and Brazil's AGI Bank. The platform enables businesses to deploy highly customizable, human-like AI agents that interact seamlessly with customers through real-time video chats. eSelf was founded by CEO Dr. Alan Bekker, a pioneer in deep learning in Israel and former Head of Conversational AI at Snap, and CTO Eylon Shoshan, an alumni of the prestigious 8200 intelligence unit with a master's in natural language processing from Technion. Dr. Bekker's previous venture Voca, which created human-like voice bots for call centers, was acquired by Snap for $100M. During his tenure at Snap, where he worked with its 400M+ daily active users and served as one of OpenAI's earliest design partners, Bekker recognized that businesses were seeking more immersive and natural ways to engage with customers at scale. The co-founders developed eSelf's platform to enable businesses to create and deploy customized AI agents that can engage in face-to-face video conversations with customers, while seamlessly integrating with existing business systems and processes. Through the company's self-service studio, businesses can configure their agents' personality, knowledge base, and capabilities without requiring technical expertise. The platform integrates directly with business tools like Salesforce and Calendly, allowing agents to access real-time information about products and services, and perform actions such as scheduling appointments. "We've developed a unified engine that processes speech, understanding, and visual elements simultaneously, allowing us to achieve response times of under one second which is crucial for natural conversation," said Dr. Bekker. "Unlike other solutions that simply animate faces for voice responses, our platform is a complete visual comprehension engine. This means our AI agents can actively engage with visuals in real-time -- showcasing property tours, educational content, or presentation slides during conversations. By enabling businesses to create sophisticated, customized agents through our self-service studio, we aim to transform how they engage with customers at scale." Christie's is using eSelf's AI agent for its Portugal real estate brokerage firm as a first point of contact for potential buyers. The AI real estate agent qualifies leads by inquiring about buyers' requirements and budget, then draws from Christie's property database in real-time to showcase relevant listings, complete with images and property details. At AGI Bank, one of Brazil's largest digital banks with over 10 million customers, virtual support agents help users navigate digital banking services, while DL Holdings, a Hong Kong financial services firm, employs multilingual eSelf agents to provide financial advisory services in both English and Mandarin. "Since implementing eSelf's AI agents, we've seen a significant increase in our ROI," said João Cília, CEO of Christie's Porta da Frente. "These AI-powered agents have transformed our customer engagement, providing personalized, real-time interactions 24/7 that were previously impossible. By easing the property discovery process for clients and offering immediate support, we've seen stronger client relationships and more streamlined operations. eSelf has truly redefined how we connect with our clients digitally, making our team more efficient and our client satisfaction levels higher than ever." "The conversational AI space is evolving rapidly, but very few teams combine deep technical expertise with proven commercial success in this domain," said Pedro Correia de Barros of Explorer Investments. "Dr. Bekker and the eSelf team have not only developed breakthrough technology for real-time face-to-face AI interactions, but they've also made it accessible to enterprises through a no-code platform. Their early traction with global customers like Christie's demonstrates the strong demand for more human-like digital interactions, and we believe eSelf is perfectly positioned to lead this next wave of customer engagement." While eSelf's core focus is providing enterprise solutions, the company has also observed significant organic consumer interest in face-to-face AI interactions. After implementing a demo on their website, eSelf discovered hundreds of thousands of users engaging in millions of conversations with their AI agents, particularly in the U.S. market. This unexpected consumer demand has provided valuable insights for improving the platform's conversational capabilities. The company remains focused on developing its enterprise solution and expanding its business customer base, while providing access to individual users. View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/eself-raises-4-5m-seed-launches-platform-for-face-to-face-ai-conversational-agents-302328792.html SOURCE eSelf Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs

Founder who built Snap's AI launches a snappy new take on video chatbots

A deep learning scientist whose last startup was acquired by Snap to build its My AI chatbot has raised seed funding for his latest venture: a platform for building and operating real-time, video-based conversational AI agents. eSelf, as the startup is known, is today coming out of stealth with $4.5 million in its coffers to enter the race to build live, interactive, and more realistic AI assistants. Its initial focus is on verticals including education, sales, financial services, real estate, and health and wellness. eSelf's early pitch is that its agents' current query/interaction response time is under 1.7 seconds -- which it claims is faster, and thus more lifelike, than voice responses from other leading companies like OpenAI. The Israeli startup has launched a "no-code" creation studio that lets its customers build their own agents. These agents can operate common apps -- like Calendly, Salesforce, others -- to schedule appointments, access collateral content, and to reference data just as a human assistant might do. eSelf says it has, in stealth, already powered "millions" of real-time conversations. Current customers include Christie's real estate, and Brazilian bank AGI. Explorer Investments, a firm out of Portugal, led the round with participation from Ridge Ventures and strategic angel investors such as Eyal Manor, former VP of engineering at YouTube and chief product and engineering officer at Twilio. eSelf is co-founded by Dr Alan Bekker (CEO) and Eylon Shoshan (CTO), and it has an unlikely origin story. Bekker, who lives in Tel Aviv, tells me his original wish was to become a rabbi -- an ambition that he fell out of love with several years into studying, he said, after approaching the chief rabbi in his school, asking big questions about God and faith, and not being satisfied with the answers he got in return. "I came home to my wife Lisa," he said. "I told her I didn't believe in God anymore." Whether he reconciled that in the end or not, I have no idea. But it seems that he did discover another kind of religion in the wake of that dramatic moment. "My passion was always about understanding humans and our world in general," he said. He had a longstanding interest in math from his days as a student, and so he dropped out of rabbinical school and turned to university to study engineering, physics and computer science. He signed up for a course in machine learning "completely by mistake," he said, and it gave him a glimpse into another kind of omniscience. "You can, with mathematics, understand natural language, vision, speech," he said. "It was mind blowing." First startup sold for $100M Fast forward through a PhD, many research papers, and a lot of loans (now repaid), Bekker became a specialist in voice recognition, neural networks and deep learning. He also had an entrepreneurial itch and, it turns out, a knack for proverbially spotting where the puck is going. His first startup was Voca, which focused on building AI voice assistants for call centers. It started to rack up large customers like American Express and TNT (now a part of FedEx), and then Snap came knocking. As we reported at the time, Snap acquired the startup in 2020 for $100 million, but with little indication of how it would use the tech. Bekker took on a role as the head of Conversational AI at Snap where he led a team that built... conversational AI tech. But it took almost three years, and for the tech world to be turned upside down with the viral arrival of generative AI, for that to finally make a landing point in a product. By the time Snapchat launched My AI, its conversational chatbot, in 2023, Bekker had been a year out of the company. Perhaps just as well: My AI had mixed (and some quite negative) responses since getting released. (Bekker tells us that while he was involved in the tech, he wasn't wasn't involved in building the product or the integration with Snapchat.) Meanwhile, he started thinking of what the next generation of AI agents might look like: rather than voice- and text-based queries, with text-based responses, he saw the potential for a more interactive and humanlike product, using video and voice in the response. Bekker teamed up with Shoshan, who cut his teeth in Israel's 8200 unit and is a specialist in natural language processing, to co-found eSelf. The tech world is fast becoming crowded with companies targeting what is now being described as the "agentic" opportunity. Tapping into advances in Generative AI, there has been an array of companies emerging that are working on delivering responses that are not just more accurate but more believable because of the form -- a 'human' with a 'voice' -- delivering it. Companies including H, Eleven Labs, Amazon, Anthropic, the newly launched /dev/agents, LinkedIn and OpenAI are creating building blocks to craft agents to carry out various tasks. Startups and established players like Salesforce are also coming out with agents for specific use cases like shopping, assisting enterprise sales and revenue teams, and design. It's very early days, but it will be worth watching to see which of these catch on with paying users, and which startups land investors to help them grow. That is, if you assume any of this will take off and get past some of the significant gating factors. One area that has proven to be a major cash drain is the building and training of models. Bekker said that eSelf has not built its own LLMs from the ground up. Instead, it has fine-tuned Meta-created Llama models, among others. "Customers who have chatbot in place built on, say, GPT, can change to use that," he said, "but the latency will be longer."