Conversational AI platform Parloa has raised $66 million in a Series B round, a year after raising $21 million from a number of European investors to fuel its international growth.
The German company focuses particularly on the USA and also opened an office in New York last year. It is said that this hub helped him attract “several Fortune 200 companies” in the region. For the latest round, Parloa has tapped Altimeter Capital as lead backer, a US-based VC firm known for its investments in companies such as Uber, Airbnb, Snowflake, Twilio and HubSpot.
AI and automation are nothing new in customer service, but with a new wave of large language models (LLMs) and generative AI infrastructure, truly intelligent “conversational” AI (i.e. not dumb chatbots) is firmly back in investor focus. Established players continue to raise significant amounts of money – Kore.ai, for example, closed a hefty $150 million round from well-known backers such as Nvidia a few months ago. Elsewhere, entrepreneur and former Salesforce CEO Bret Taylor launched a new customer experience platform called Sierra in February, based on the concept of “AI agents,” which has raised more than $100 million from venture investors.
Parloa is well-positioned to capitalize on the “AI with everything” hype that has peaked in recent years as companies look for new ways to increase efficiency through automation.
Founded in 2018, the startup has already signed up big-name customers such as European insurance giant Swiss Life and sporting goods retailer Decathlon, both of which use Parloa’s platform to automate customer communications, including emails and instant messaging.
However, according to co-founder and CEO Malte Kosub, what makes Parloa stand out is its “voice.”
“Our strategy has always focused on ‘Voice First,’ the most critical and impactful aspect of the customer experience,” Kosub told TechCrunch via email. “This makes Parloa’s AI-powered voice conversations sound more humane than any other solution.”
Parloa platform Photo credits: Parloa
Co-founder and CTO Stefan Ostwald says AI has been a core part of Parloa’s DNA since its founding six years ago. The company uses a mix of proprietary and open source LLMs to train models for speech-to-text use cases.
“We have trained a variety of speech-to-text models for phone audio quality and customer service use cases. “We have developed a bespoke telephony infrastructure to minimize latency – a key challenge in voice automation – as well as a proprietary LLM agent framework for customer service,” he said.
Parloa had previously raised around $25 million, most of which came via the Series A round last year. With another $66 million in the bank, the company is now well-funded to double its growth in both Europe and the US. Kosub noted that the company 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 overwhelming and rapid success it achieved in the US exceeded all expectations,” said Kosub.
In addition to lead investor Altimeter, Parloa’s Series B received checks from EQT Ventures, Newion, Senovo, Mosaic Ventures and La Familia Growth. Today’s funding brings the company’s total capital raised to $98 million, after raising a $21 million Series A in 2023 led by EQT Ventures.