Aisera Inc., an artificial intelligence-powered “service experience” startup that aims to improve employee and customer experiences, said today it has closed a $90 million final round of funding.
The Series D round was led by Goldman Sachs Growth Equity and Thoma Bravo and saw the participation of a host of other investors: Zoom Video Communications Inc., Cisco Systems Inc., RingCentral Inc., True Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners , Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital, Webb Investment Network and Sherpalo.
Aisera has created what it says is a proactive, personalized and predictive AI-based Service Experience Platform that automates key processes around customer service, employee service desk and information technology ticketing. A kind of ServiceNow on steroids, the platform enables virtual agents that can handle multiple types of requests.
For example, if employees’ company-issued smartphones break, they can request a new device, and Aisera will show them what options are available. On the customer service side, it can help with questions about tracking orders, refunds and returns. The platform also handles operational experiences, helping IT staff investigate the root cause of application outages, for example.
Aisera says its platform can auto-resolve tasks, actions and workflows for IT, human resources, customer service, sales and operations teams. Furthermore, it can be integrated with widely used business applications such as Salesforce, Oracle, Zendesk, Workday, Adobe and Atlassian.
The main part is AI. Aisera integrates unsupervised natural language understanding and knowledge graph-based conversational AI models to handle interactions. This is further enhanced by user intelligence models that are able to analyze user behavior and feelings, so that it can understand if that person is satisfied with the solution or advice it offers.
Aisera Chief Executive Muddu Sudhakar appeared on SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio theCUBE earlier this year, where he described his company as a pioneer of artificial intelligence operations, or AIOps, helping enterprises become “AI -native.”
“The next layer will be called system intelligence, and that’s where artificial intelligence will come into play,” Sudhakar said. “We’re talking cloud-native, [but] it will be called AI-native. AI-native is a new buzzword and it implies the use of AI for customer service and IT operations.
Constellation Research Inc. said. Vice President and Principal Analyst Andy Thurai at SiliconANGLE that Aisera offers several different platforms that are strong in the marketplace. These include an AIOps solution that provides automated root cause analysis, automated causal graphs and a service topology graph based on change requests, incident data and alerts. It has also developed an AI-based asset discovery tool that identifies applications, devices and currently provisioned resources, providing continuous visibility into service components and their operational status, he said.
Thurai was also impressed with Aisera’s conversational AI platform, which he said is a “mature platform” that supports 74 languages. “It also provides auto-language detection, which means a customer and support agent can translate into the language of their choice and have the system deliver a correct translation,” Thurai said. “Reinforcement learning works by learning from past customer conversations, tickets and cases, essentially using customer knowledge and user profiles to maintain itself. It also has the option to escalate chatbots to a live agent when needed.”
Aisera’s AI-native gaming has found a receptive audience, with the company expanding its customer base to more than 75 million users, growing more than 300% in the past 12 months. Its customers include VMware Inc., Snowflake Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc. The startup said this year’s economic uncertainty means businesses are becoming more interested in using AI to automate many aspects of their business and increase the efficiency of their workforce and boost customer loyalty.
“AI has become necessary to support employees in today’s hyper-inflationary, work-from-anywhere environment and customers who expect to get help quickly,” Sudhakar said in a statement.
That AI is also having a big impact, with Aisera saying customers are seeing huge improvements in employee and customer satisfaction, while reducing their support costs by up to 70%. “Aisera will be the invisible hand of innovation that will enable all users – across all lines of business and industries – to get the support experiences they expect without latency, error, or human interruption,” he promises by Sudhakar.
Aisera said it will use the funds from today’s round to strengthen its position in the AI service experience space, with a focus on expanding into new industry verticals.
Photo: SiliconANGLE
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