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Uniphore, an AI-powered platform that helps businesses understand, analyze, and automate their voice-based customer service, has raised $140 million in a series D round of funding.
The company said that it plans to use the investment to expand its existing conversational AI and machine learning technologies deeper into the enterprise, with a particular focus on video-based applications. The genesis for this expansion actually dates back a couple of months its acquisition of Emotion Research Lab, a Spanish startup which determines emotion and engagement levels through video-based interactions by tracking facial expressions and eye movement.
Founded out of India in 2008, Uniphore’s platform is built around four core services. U-Self-Serve, designed to give businesses quick-setup access to a conversational AI assistant; U-Analyze, which uses natural language processing (NLP) to glean insights and generate analytics from customer conversations; U-Trust, an automated voice authentication tool that helps companies verify an agents’ identity in a remote-working world; and U-Assist, which serves up real-time call transcriptions and in-call alerts.
Beyond customer service
Uniphore, which opened a new U.S. HQ in Palo Alto in 2019, had previously raised $81 million and claims a roster of major enterprise clients including BNP Paribas. Its latest investment was led by Sorenson Capital Partners, with participation from notable enterprise backers including Cisco Investments.
By adding video to its existing automated voice monitoring smarts, Uniphore is essentially looking beyond the customer service realm and into sales, marketing, HR, among other business verticals. Anywhere, in effect, where companies may come face-to-face with people over video, which is particularly pertinent at a time when the world has had to rapidly embrace remote work.
In addition to expanding into video-based applications, Uniphore said that it will invest in other areas around trust, security, and robotic process automation (RPA), which follows shortly after it acquired an exclusive third-party RPA license from NTT Data.
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