Enterprise Conversational AI Startup Yellow.ai Raises $78.15M
Enterprise conversational AI startup Yellow.ai has closed a $78.15 million Series C funding round led by WestBridge Capital. The company, formerly known as Yellow Messenger, is working on expanding its automated conversational AI for companies to new platforms and clients in the wake of its headquarters moving from India to the U.S.
Yellow Money
Yellow’s automated chat services already run on several major messaging services, company websites, and voice assistant platforms like Alexa. The text and voice AI bots can communicate in more than 100 languages and handle customer interactions, including sales and complaints. The platform can respond to what customers say using Yellow’s natural language processing skill combined with data from a client’s Salesforce, Shopify, Cisco, or other business service account. And Yellow’s platform is designed to minimize the coding necessary to create the bots as a way of enticing larger enterprises to join without needing to hire dedicated programmers.
“yellow.ai has broken out of the crowded virtual-assistant market with our automation-first with human-assist model, to deliver a higher customer satisfaction and incremental revenue growth to our enterprise clients,” Yellow.ai CEO Raghu Ravinutala said. “With our rapid client and revenue expansion across the world, we’re geared to become the global leader in the CX Automation space and are bullish on building our product, partnerships, teams, and community to truly democratize AI in the near future.”
Yellow Growth
Yellow has been very busy over the last year. The company started a partnership with Microsoft to upgrade its voice AI services with Microsoft’s Azure Cognitive to make the custom voice assistants seem more human in their interactions early this year. Yellow’s voice AI is designed to understand both language and sentiment, using previous interactions with customers to better craft responses in more than 100 languages. The new investors included Sapphire Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, and previous investor Lightspeed Venture Partners, and skyrocketed the total raised by Yellow to $102.15 million. Investor confidence likely came easy for Yellow, which reported 470% growth in recurring revenue and many new customers since its last round of funding in April of last year.
And Yellow is far from alone in seeing a lot of investment money coming over the last year, with healthcare AI and enterprise services leading the way. New chatbots and platforms proliferated, such as XAPP AI’s Conversational Self Service for Contact Center Intelligence. Startups saw huge funding rounds as well, with significant rounds announced regularly, including $14 million for higher-ed chatbot platform AdmitHub in February, Rasa’s $26 million round last June, and the $100 million raised by Gupshup last month.
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Yellow Messenger Becomes Yellow.ai and Launches Voice AI Platform in the US
