Artificial Solutions Raises $14.5M From Stock Sales

Conversational AI developer Artificial Solutions has raised a little over $14.5 million by selling off about 14.1 million shares of stock. The Swedish company plans on using the cash infusion to expand the reach and variety of features of its Teneo platform.

AI Solutions

Artificial Solutions created Teneo as a tool for designing and programming custom chatbots and virtual assistants. Like many other conversational AI providers, Artificial Solutions saw a huge surge in demand over the last year, partly as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.  The company also brought in new CEO, Per Ottosson, to help direct the company to better take advantage of the boost and the overall shift in conversational AI toward the software-as-a-service model. This year, the company integrated Teneo with Microsoft’s LUIS NLU. That partnership lets clients build and run bots based on LUIS but with lower demand on resources. Artificial Solutions next made Teneo available through Microsoft Azure Marketplace.

Teneo is particularly well known for the enormous number of languages it supports. Most recently, Teneo added Korean and Albanian to its list, for a total of 86 languages available on Teneo. The idea is to localize languages in chatbots and other conversational AI creations to speed up their expansion. That way, businesses and enterprises can easily incorporate the chatbot into any geographic expansion plans.

“Our technology can deliver solutions in languages that haven’t been catered to before, and our approach is to continue localizing top-level solutions to eliminate the need to rebuild bots whenever an enterprise wants to expand its reach,” Artificial Solutions CTO Andreas Wieweg said.

Finding Funding

Artificial Solutions sold the 14.1 million shares for a total of 120 million Swedish kronor for about $1.03 a share. The company wanted the cash for business expansion and product development and decided this was the most efficient way to raise funds. The need for a capital infusion is not uncommon, but Artificial Solutions does stand out compared to the more common story of venture capital funding for conversational AI, like that secured by startups like Botco and Rasa.

“The Company has since the beginning of 2021 transitioned from a traditional license-based software model to a software as a service model (SaaS), with the objective to further scale and grow the Artificial Solutions’ Teneo platform,” Ottosson said in a statement. “The global spending on artificial intelligence (AI) is forecasted to double over the next four years, growing from USD 50 billion dollars in 2020 to more than USD 110 billion in 2024. We intend to use the proceeds to increase our market share, to attract more customers and a larger installed base of users in the fastest growing part of the AI-market, the Conversational AI market.”

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Per Ottosson CEO of Artificial Solutions – Voicebot Podcast Ep 203