Conversational AI platform Parloa has nabbed $66 million in a Series B round of funding, a yr after the German startup raised $21 million from a swathe of European investors to propel its international growth.
The corporate is specializing in the U.S. market particularly, where Parloa opened a Recent York office last yr — it says this hub helped it join “several Fortune 200 corporations” within the region. For its latest instalment, Parloa has secured Altimeter Capital as lead backer, a U.S.-based VC firm notable for its previous investments within the likes of Uber, Airbnb, Snowflake, Twilio, and HubSpot.
AI and automation in customer support is nothing latest, but with a brand new wave of huge language models (LLMs) and generative AI infrastructure, truly smart “conversational” AI (i.e. not dumb chatbots) is again firmly in investors’ focus. Established players proceed to boost substantial sums, akin to Kore.ai which closed a chunky $150 million round of funding just a few months ago from big-name backers akin to Nvidia. Elsewhere, entrepreneur and former Salesforce CEO Bret Taylor launched a brand new customer experience platform called Sierra, built across the concept of “AI agents,” with north of $100 million in VC backing.
Parloa is well-positioned to capitalize on the “AI with every thing” hype that has hit fever pitch these past couple of years, as corporations seek latest ways to enhance efficiency through automation.
Founded out of Germany in 2018, Parloa has already secured high-profile customers akin to European insurance giant Swiss Life and sporting goods retailer Decathlon, which use the Parloa platform to automate customer communications including emails and quick messaging.
Nonetheless, “voice” is where co-founder and CEO Malte Kosub reckons Parloa stands out.
“Our strategy has all the time been centered around ‘voice first,’ probably the most critical and impactful facet of the shopper experience,” Kosub told TechCrunch over email. “In consequence, Parloa’s AI-based voice conversations sound more human than every other solution.”
Parloa platform Image Credits: Parloa
Co-founder and CTO Stefan Ostwald says that AI has been a core a part of Parloa’s DNA since its inception six years ago, using a combination of proprietary and open source LLMs to coach models for speech-to-text use-cases.
“We’ve trained quite a lot of speech-to-text models on phone audio quality and customer support use cases, developed a custom telephony infrastructure to reduce latency — a key challenge in voice automation — and a proprietary LLM agent framework for customer support,” he said.
Before now, Parloa had raised around $25 million, the majority of which arrived via its Series A round last yr. And with one other $66 million within the bank, it’s well-financed to double down on each its European and U.S. growth, with Kosub noting that it has tripled its revenue in each of the past three years.
“We successfully entered the U.S. market in 2023 — we’ve all the time had confidence within the excellence and competitiveness of our product, nevertheless the overwhelming and rapid success it achieved within the U.S. surpassed everyone’s expectations,” Kosub said.
Aside form lead investor Altimeter, Parloa’s Series B round included money 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.
