Voiceflow Closes $20M Funding Round to Extend Conversational AI Platform
Voice app design and prototyping startup Voiceflow has closed a $20 million Series A funding round led by Felicis Ventures. The company’s platform supports thousands of voice apps across many platforms and is working on expanding its enterprise clientele with additional features and tools.
Voiceflow Fund
Voiceflow’s collections of tools enable developers to design and build voice apps for any supported system. The designs can be prototyped and prepared for publication on a number of platforms, acting like self-contained voice assistants able to adapt to their surroundings. Earlier this year, Voiceflow gathered many of its updates into a comprehensive revamp of its platform called Voiceflow V2, focusing on enabling designers to deploy voice apps built for one platform to publish them on others.
The multi-channel voice app could then appear on Facebook Messenger, Slack, Twilio, and WhatsApp, among many others. The company counts more than 75,000 users whose creations handle more than 300 million interactions a year. That number is only growing thanks to more companies creating AI voice apps to talk to customers, Voiceflow CEO Braden Ream told Voicebot in an interview. Voiceflow provides options for those brands, particularly those who don’t want minimal or no coding experience to stop their plans.
“We’re doubling down on our existing strategies. Our long-term plans focus on enterprise,” Ream said. “We’re steadily expanding and will be doubling our engineering team over the next three months or so.”
No-Code Funding
Voiceflow’s comprehensive platform stands out, but the demand for conversational AI platforms is enormous and only seems to be growing. Investors have been writing plenty of large checks, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the response. The latest funding round included investors like conversational AI designer Cathy Pearl, Craft Ventures, and several others. The startup also added the Google Assistant Investments Program to its roster of investors, joining Amazon’s Alexa Fund on the list. Alexa invested in lat 2019, several months after Voiceflow closed a $2.5 million seed fund led by True Ventures.
Voiceflow’s comprehensive platform stands out, but the demand for conversational AI platforms is enormous and only seems to be growing. Investors have been writing plenty of large checks, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the response. The huge number of variations on the theme has attracted investors to write checks for a range of startups with hand in conversational AI. The numbers range from the $2.1 million secured young startups Webio in June to the $120 million picked up by ASAPP and Hyro’s $10.5 million raise around the same time. The low or no-code platform options like Zammo are looking to the potential investors to pick up some of the change as well. With Microsoft’s nearly $20 billion acquisition of Nuance underway, the independent nature of Voicceflow and the voice apps built with it are attracting even more potential clients. Ream cites the line connecting Spotify to US Bank as proof of just how broad the range of companies eager to build with voice is.
“We’re constantly evolving our product to keep up with demand,” Ream said. “We are growing in new places, not just platforms but custom hardware, and custom solutions. We span across communities.”
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