With an aim to help businesses scale their customer service with artificial intelligence, Helsinki and Berlin-based ultimate.ai, a customer service automation platform, has raised $20M (approx €16.4M) in its Series A round of funding.
The round was led by OMERS Ventures, with participation from Felicis Ventures and existing investors HV Capital and Maki.vc. The current round brings the company’s total raised capital to more than $25M (approx €20.5M).
Utilisation of the funds
The raised capital will advance the company’s AI-powered automation platform, which currently powers customer interactions in over 20 languages, and to expand to North America and further throughout Europe.
Reetu Kainulainen, CEO and co-founder of ultimate.ai, says “The new funding comes at a time of massive growth for us. This will enable us to keep investing in a category-defining product. We have been uniquely placed to provide crucial support for businesses that have experienced a surge in online customers, and the years of foundation building, product development, and our team culture have enabled us to ride the tailwind of the COVID-19.”
About Ultimate.ai
The company was founded in November 2016 by Sarah Al-Hussaini, Reetu Kainulainen, Jaakko Pasanen, and Markus Rautio. ultimate.ai’s mission is to empower brands to drive better customer experiences through automation.
ultimate.ai is a virtual customer service agent builder that offers multilingual customer service automation to businesses. The company’s proprietary deep learning technology enables customer service automation in all languages. The founders developed their entire deep learning stack in-house, enabling fully language-agnostic technology without the need for a translation layer, claims the company.
The multichannel solution, deployed across chat, email, and social, provides a bird’s eye view of customer communication and empowers brands to customise virtual agents for their unique business needs.
In addition, ultimate.ai claims its virtual agent has been integrated within the world’s leading CRM providers, including Salesforce and Zendesk. It talks to customers, manages tickets, works in back-office systems, escalates to other team members, and offers a multitude of other features.
Its AI-first solution automates up to 80% of support interactions, freeing agents from
repetitive requests. Rather than teams needing to replace their existing system, ultimate.ai claims it can instead supercharge current workflows and setups.
Growth and development
The funding follows a year of massive growth and momentum for ultimate.ai, claims the company. It has tripled its annual recurring revenue over the last 12 months (for the second
year in a row) and has also tripled its headcount.
Kainulainen sees potential in the market. She says, “We’ve seen market maturity accelerate. After the first-generation of ineffective chatbots, businesses today really know what they’re looking for. Customer service automation has leap-frogged from simple FAQs to full process automation across all digital channels. We really see the A-players emerge.”
ultimate.ai has offices in Helsinki and Berlin and is backed by HV Capital, Maki.vc, OMERS Ventures, Felicis Ventures, and Techstars.
Image credit: Ultimate.ai
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