- Replicant — a cutting-edge provider of AI-enabled voice technologies — announced it raised $7 million in seed funding
Replicant — a cutting-edge provider of artificial intelligence-enabled voice technologies — announced it raised $7 million in seed funding to launch their solution and revolutionize the contact center industry with AI-based voice technology. This round of funding included participation from Atomic, Bloomberg Beta, Costanoa Ventures, and Norwest Venture Partners.
And Replicant also announced that Gadi Shamia — who is the former Chief Operating Officer of cloud contact center leader Talkdesk — has joined Replicant as Chief Executive Officer. Shamia is taking the CEO position following a four-year run helping build Talkdesk from a seed-stage company to the first and only call center software “unicorn.”
Plus Replicant is introducing an innovative way for contact centers to deal with tedious and repetitive customer service calls at scale. Replicant has created a state‑of‑the‑art AI voice technology that enables full phone conversations between a bot—the “Thinking Machine”—and a customer. Once the technology deployed, Replicant can take care of common call flows and escalate the more complex and emotional calls to live agents.
“Agents are frustrated by answering the same questions 100 times a day. Callers suffer from long wait times and inconsistent service while companies find it hard to control costs and scale without impacting customer satisfaction,” added Shamia. “Our AI solution lessens those pain points while improving customer service.”
The Thinking Machine understands full sentences in real‑time rather than just processing keywords. And based on this understanding, the Thinking Machine makes rapid decisions, responds in less than a second, and takes action to solve the problem at hand like updating shipping addresses or issuing refunds. When it is unable to handle an issue, the Thinking Machine passes the call to an agent with a bullet-point summary of the progress to enable a smooth transition without any lost time.
“AI can power long‑running voice conversations between smart virtual agents and customers to solve real problems at scale,” explained Scott Beechuk — a partner at Norwest Venture Partners. “Replicant is leading this new wave of automation and is far ahead of any competing product with bots that sound and feel amazingly real.”
Replicant had spent two years developing proprietary AI technology that engages customers in full conversations — which feel natural, conversational, and speedy.
“Replicant engages with our customers and helps them in meaningful ways. We aren’t simply deflecting calls. It feels more like Replicant is a new member of the team that helps our staff focus on higher impact calls and deliver to a higher standard of customer service,” noted Ross Rader — the Chief Customer Experience Officer at Tucows.
Replicant’s Thinking Machine answers customer calls 24/7 with zero wait time and offers contact centers the same elasticity that Amazon Web Services provides to data centers. And agent satisfaction increases since they can focus on more complex and interesting tasks.
