UJET Secures $76M Funding and New Co-CEO to Boost AI-Powered Customer Support

AI-Powered Customer Support Startup Ujet Raises $76M

Perhaps no space is more ripe for an AI takeover than the contact centers industry -- and VC investors seem to agree. The San Francisco-based startup's platform allows clients to use generative AI technologies for "more efficient, hyper-personalized customer experiences at enterprise scale," according to the company's release. "Generative AI has moved beyond an experiment or a chatbot replacement exercise to become the catalyst for leapfrog improvements in CX," co-founder and CEO Anand Janefalkar said in the release. "Human-sounding conversations alone are no longer sufficient, as people now regularly communicate via chat or voice conversations overlaid with rich media. With generative AI, we can transform these conversations into high bandwidth visual and contextual interactions." Founded in 2015, the company has raised $177 million, per Crunchbase. Contact and customer service centers are an obvious use for the ever-improving conversational AI technologies being produced. More AI means fewer people needed to take or route calls and perhaps even more efficiency for large companies using it. That's likely why investors have funded a slew of startups this year such as Level AI, Parloa and several others that have received investment this year.

Contact center-as-a-service startup Ujet raises $76M to accelerate generative AI development - SiliconANGLE

Contact center-as-a-service startup Ujet raises $76M to accelerate generative AI development The cloud contact center company Ujet Inc. said today it has closed on a $76 million late-stage round of funding, earmarking the money to accelerate its deployment of generative artificial intelligence to enhance customer support experiences. Today's Series D round was led by existing investor Sapphire Ventures and saw participation from KeyCorp and IonPacific, which are both backing the company for the first time. Other existing investors, including GV, Kleiner Perkins, Citi Ventures, DCM and Ericsson Ventures, were involved in the round too. Ujet sells a contact center platform that helps to handle the logistics of providing customer support services via voice and chat. Its platform comes with analytics features that help companies to monitor their help desk operations and discover ways to improve their efficiency. Its tools include a portal for managers that allows them to easily assign human agents to queues, based on how busy the customer support center is. Like many contact center software providers, Ujet also boasts of an array of AI-powered tools, including virtual agents that use natural language processing and behavioral analytics to determine customer intent and either resolve their issues automatically, if possible, or hand them off to a human agent. Other AI functionality includes its intelligent routing technology, which taps real-time and historical data to route customer inquiries dynamically based on such factors as previous interactions with the customer or desired outcomes. If the customer is routed to a human agent, it will provide that agent with a contextual summary of the customer's previous interactions, plus background information that can inform the interaction. It takes into account things such as the incoming caller's or messager's IP address or the web pages they have viewed recently to determine their intent. Another cool feature is Ujet's guaranteed-callback algorithm, which can provide customers with an estimated time for when a human agent will call them back, with 92% accuracy, so they don't have to waste time on hold. It does this by calculating factors such as the current level of traffic in the call center, the average call duration and agent availability. Ujet said it wants to boost these AI capabilities and introduce even more capabilities into its platform, based on the most advanced generative AI models available. The funds will help the company to accelerate its vision of creating a generative AI-powered customer service orchestration platform, delivered as a contact center-as-a-service. Some of the generative AI features it's working on cover intelligent self-service, agent guidance and process automation, the company said. Founding Chief Executive Anand Janefalkar said generative AI has matured to the point where it's no longer an experimental tech for chatbot replacement exercises, but can become the catalyst for "leapfrog improvements" in customer experiences. "Human-sounding conversations alone are no longer sufficient, as people now regularly communicate via chat or voice conversations overlaid with rich media," he said. "With generative AI, we can transform these conversations into high bandwidth visual and contextual interactions, while offering fluid transitions between virtual and human agents, depending on complexity, urgency and empathetic themes." In addition to the funding, Ujet said it's promoting Chief Operating Officer Vasili Triant to co-CEO. That will allow Janefalkar to focus more on scaling up its product and engineering efforts to kickstart a new phase of growth. "Vasili, in the last four years, has not only embraced but advanced UJET's ethos to include a higher velocity motion for businesses large and small alike, who want to be sure-footed with their gen AI investment towards predictable ROI and CSAT gains," Janefalkar said.

Customer Support Startup Ujet Gets New co-CEO, $76 Million in Funding

Customer service startup Ujet Inc. has raised $76 million from investors and named a new co-chief executive officer. San Francisco-based Ujet, which uses artificial intelligence to help businesses with their customer support, was valued at $500 million in the new funding round, led by Sapphire Ventures, with participation from GV, Kleiner Perkins and Citi Ventures.