Uniphore Acquires Customer Service AI Startup Colabo
Call center conversational AI unicorn Uniphore has acquired enterprise knowledge automation AI startup Colabo for an undisclosed sum. Uniphore plans to augment its virtual customer service agents provided to clients with Colabo’s AI tools for pulling useful information from databases and document collections.
AI Knowledge Mines
Uniphore offers virtual customer service agents to enterprise clients for interacting with customers who call with questions or complaints. Providing answers beyond the basics usually requires a database specifically tailored for AI or frequent transfers to humans who can navigate the legacy system of information that would confuse most virtual agents. Colabo claims to solve the conversational automation issue by sorting and extracting the requested information in real-time, even if the data is entirely unstructured. The Israeli startup adds flexibility to virtual agents so that they don’t have to turn to humans for help as frequently and improves the customer’s experience with the AI agents.
“From the start, we built Colabo with a vision to help personalize customers’ experiences from when they contact a business to when their issue is resolved,” Colabo CEO Yoav Dembak said. “Today, I am proud to say we have achieved that and will be taking our vision even further by integrating into Uniphore’s conversational AI and automation platform, bringing rigor and best-of-breed agility and accuracy to every contact center inquiry.”
Uniphore Uniting
Colabo marks Uniphore’s third acquisition in the last year, following low-code development platform Jacada and facial expression emotional analysis firm Emotion Research Lab. This is the first company bought by Uniphore since raising $400 million in an NEA-led round in February. That bumped Uniphore’s valuation to $2.5 billion, smashing through the billion-dollar ‘unicorn’ ranking 15 years and $610 million in investment after launching. The money likely helped smooth the purchase of Colabo and the integration of its tech into Uniphore’s enterprise natural language processing and analytics toolset. There’s a lot of funding and acquisitions happening in enterprise AI, as Gupshup’s purchase of Active AI and Knowlarity over the last few months attests. Colabo gives Uniphore more ways to compete as it jockeys with enterprise AI rivals.
“Simply put, consumers today expect access to up-to-date information to solve their problems and contact centers can provide better experiences with the latest technologies that do exactly that,” Uniphore CEO Umesh Sachdev said. “This acquisition brings together unique capabilities to arm enterprises with new tools that provide a quick resolution to consumer queries and empower agents with real-time, actionable information.”
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