AI Convo Platform Uniphore Gets $51M For Global Growth

Conversation artificial intelligence (AI) company Uniphore, which is a platform to help companies with customer service and data needs, raised $51 million in a series C funding round to continue its expansion into North America from India.

The round was led by March Capital Partners, Patni Family, Iron Pillar, ITP, CXO Fund, Sistema Asia and Chiratae Ventures, according to a report by VentureBeat.

The company was founded in 2008 and has three main services it offers to companies. The first is called Akeira, and it’s a conversational AI helper. The second is AuMina, which takes natural language processing (NLP) and collects data and insights from conversations. The third service is called AmVoice, which helps to confirm someone’s identity and also stop fraud.

Uniphore has worked with companies like PNB MetLife, NTT Data and BNP Paribas. The company’s main office is in Chennai, but it recently moved to the U.S., to Silicon Valley and built headquarters in Palo Alto. It’s not known how much Uniphore has raised previously, but Co-Founder and CEO Umesh Sachdev said this is the most money it has raised so far. The company said it will use the funding to continue expanding and hiring across the globe.

“Today’s announcement of our series C funding represents a major milestone for Uniphore and the conversational AI market as a whole,” Sachdev said. “This funding will accelerate our vision to redefine customer service through AI-enabled conversational service automation (CSA). With this new round of funding, we will be able to accelerate our global expansion and better serve our customers by developing and delivering innovative CSA solutions to more organizations around the world.”

The market for conversational AI is nascent but successful, and it’s worth around $4.2 billion. Reports say it could be worth as much as $16 billion by 2024. Analysts say the technology could soon be in cars, banks, food chains and grocery stores, among other things.