Speech Analytics Firm CallMiner Raises $75M From Goldman Sachs
Speech analytics technology firm CallMiner has closed a $75 million funding round solely from Goldman Sachs. The funding is aimed at expanding the range of CallMiner’s Eureka platform to collect and understand customer call center interactions.
Analyzing Customer Interaction
CallMiner, founded in 2002, offers its clients a range of analysis tools for their customer call centers. The AI examines phone calls, emails, text chats, and other conversations to come up with useful information about how the people working at the call center can improve how they operate.
“From a financial perspective, the company is performing well. We built a good engine and when it is running hard and well you want to add things faster than you could without funding,” CallMiner co-founder and CTO Jeff Gallino told Voice bot in an interview. “The past few years we’ve invested heavily in research and how to make the platform fundamentally better. Customers are not asking for analytics in isolation, they’re asking us to make their business better.”
CallMiner collects around two trillion words a year, Gallino said, but that number is growing rapidly and could hit ten trillion by the end of 2021. That’s driven in part by the addition of new clients to the around 400 on CallMiner’s roster and partly by all of the new ways customers communicate with businesses. Gallino referred to the platform as an “omnichannel” as it collects and collates so many kinds of communication. He wouldn’t say if Goldman Sachs is one of CallMiner’s clients, but he did acknowledge the faith in CallMiner the $75 million represents.
“That it is Goldman Sachs only doing the funding round is unusual,” Gallino said. “What drove them more than anything is that they saw not only that we are the leader in speech analytics, but that we are continuously trying to stay there. We’re not rushing into the market, we are building an ecosystem of partners, we are building a platform, not just software.”
Voice Analytics Funding Blitz
The customer interaction analytics industry is getting a lot of traction of late. Investment rounds and new platform features are mushrooming. Conversation analytics startup Invoca raised $56 million in October, while Observe AI closed a $26 million funding round just this month. Then there are companies like Gridspace, which uses its Sift platform for transcribing and examining conversations with customers for useful information in real time and provides technology for Twilio’s real-time call analytics service Media Streams.
“I think of it sort of like Hollywood where there are multiple movies [about the same subject] all at once,” Gallino said. “Maybe someone pitched it one place and others heard it and weren’t a part of it, but carried it away somewhere else. Also, suite vendors are just not delivering what customers want. I’m happy about the other [fundings]. I would hate it if there were no competitors because that would mean there’s no market.
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