Conversational AI Platform Parloa landed $66 million in a Series B round, one year after the German startup raised $21 million with a group of European investors to propel its international growth.
The company is particularly focused on the US market, where Parloa opened an office in New York last year. She says the center has helped her list “several Fortune 200 companies” in the area. For its last payment, Parloa obtained Capital Altimeter as lead backer, a US-based venture capital firm known for its previous investments in companies like Uber, Airbnb, Snowflake, Twilio and HubSpot.
AI and customer service automation are nothing new, but with a new wave of big language models (LLM) and generative AI infrastructure, truly intelligent “conversational” AI (i.e. no stupid chatbots) is once again firmly in the focus of investors. Established players continue to raise significant sums, such as Kore.ai which closed a large financing round of $150 million a few months ago by major backers such as Nvidia. Elsewhere, entrepreneur and former Salesforce CEO Bret Taylor launched a new customer experience platform called Sierrabuilt around the concept of “AI agents,” with over $100 million in venture capital backing.
Parloa is well-positioned to capitalize on the “AI with everything” hype that has reached fever pitch in recent years as businesses look for new ways to improve efficiency through automation.
Founded in Germany in 2018, Parloa has already gained high-profile clients such as the European insurance giant. Switzerland Life and sporting goods retailer Decathlonwho use the Parloa platform to automate customer communications, including email and instant messaging.
However, it’s in the “voice” where Parloa stands out, according to co-founder and CEO Malte Kosub.
“Our strategy has always been focused on ‘voice first,’ the most critical and impactful facet of the customer experience,” Kosub told TechCrunch via email. “As a result, Parloa’s AI-powered voice conversations feel more human than any other solution.” »
Parloa Platform Image credits: Parloa
Co-founder and CTO Stefan Ostwald says AI has been at the heart of Parloa’s DNA since its inception six years ago, using a mix of proprietary and open source LLMs to train models for use cases speech to text.
“We trained a variety of text-to-speech models on phone audio quality and customer service use cases, developed a custom phone infrastructure to minimize latency – a key challenge in voice automation – and a framework for ‘LLM owner agent for customer service,’ he said.
Previously, Parloa raised around $25 million, most of which came via its Series A round last year. And with another $66 million in the bank, it’s well-funded to double its growth in Europe and the United States, with Kosub noting that it has tripled its revenue in each of the last three years.
“We successfully entered the US market in 2023 – we have always had confidence in the excellence and competitiveness of our product, but the massive and rapid success it has achieved in the US has exceeded everyone’s expectations said Kosub.
In addition to lead investor Altimeter, Parloa’s Series B round included cash injections from EQT Ventures, Newion, Senovo, Mosaic Ventures and La Familia Growth. Today’s funding brings Parloa’s total capital raised to date to $98 million, following its $21 million Series A funding round led by EQT Ventures in 2023.
