Bland AI – a platform automating phone calls for the enterprise using hyper-realistic AI agents – announced it emerged from stealth with a $16 million Series A funding round led by Scale Venture Partners. Other investors include: Y Combinator and angel investors Max Levchin the founder of Paypal, Piotr Dąbkowski the CTO of Eleven Labs CTO, Jeff Lawson the founder of Twilio, and others. With this funding, Bland AI has raised a total of $22 million.
The developers of the AI Phone Calling Platform will utilize the funding to hire and continue helping businesses streamline a wide range of phone-based tasks, from customer support to sales to internal operations.
Enterprises are paying employees to spend countless hours at their desks dialing numbers, answering calls, and talking to leads, customers, and other businesses, only to miss a call, drop a call, or transfer the call into a long way time. Bland AI was created to reinvent the way businesses use the most relied upon, yet outdated telecommunication system there is: phone calls.
Bland AI’s Phone Calling Platform enables enterprises to securely/safely build, test, and deploy their own AI phone calling agents. And customers start by choosing a voice and creating a conversational pathway, a tree of prompts that dictates how the AI might respond to any given response from a customer.
After a pathway is built out, the AI agent can traverse the pathway to figure out the right response, enabling it to always stay on track and help the customer, regardless of what the AI encounters. Some aspects of the platform include:
— Integrations into any other system, knowledge retrieval from documents, and the ability to transfer to a human when necessary.
— Transcripts of calls, post call analytics, and the ability to train the AI on your own phone calling data.
— Voice cloning, multi-language support, an AI testing system, and infinite calling scalability.
Enterprises are already generating and saving revenue with Bland AI. For example, customers like Better.com and Sears are creating custom AI agents, configuring and personalizing how it should react, deploying it to answer or send phone calls, extracting information to see detailed analytics, and passing any relevant data back into the company’s existing systems.
Bland AI’s team will continue developing the platform and building an advanced analytics system to allow customers in healthcare, real estate, logistics, financial services, alternative data, and small business to visualize granular phone call data that was previously impossible to obtain. And with this data, businesses can continuously optimize performance to create their perfect AI agent.
Bland AI is committed to the highest standards of trust and safety. And the platform actively restricts the calls supported, ensuring that the AI phone call technology continues to benefit consumers, businesses, and society as a whole.
KEY QUOTES:
“Bland AI is reimagining how enterprises communicate. The Bland AI agents understand human emotion, speak any language, and represent a brand like a top employee. The platform is saving businesses time and money, and enabling a whole new era of intelligent, personalized interactions at scale – and we’re excited to partner with the team as they build.”
– Andy Vitus, Partner at Scale Venture Partners
“Our mission is to fix the way businesses handle their phone communications. The problem is that humans simply can’t work 24/7, handle millions of phone calls simultaneously, or be trained to a company’s exact liking down to its voice and behavior – but AI can, and at a fraction of the cost. We want Bland to work alongside enterprises’ employees to improve efficiency across the board.”
– Isaiah Granet, CEO and Co-Founder of Bland AI
