- Cresta, a company on a mission to enable office workers to be Experts on “Day One,” announced it raised $21 million in funding
Cresta — a company that is on a mission to enable office workers to be Experts on “Day One” — announced it raised $21 million in funding from Greylock Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Andy Bechtolsheim, Mark Leslie, and Vivi Nevo. And Cresta also announced its transformative software for contact centers (a $310 billion market) is now available to the public.
A number of Fortune 500 companies using Cresta are already seeing their agents become more effective and more efficient while ramping up in significantly less time.
Founded by S. Zayd Enam, Tim Shi, and Sebastian Thrun, Cresta spun out of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence lab. With artificial intelligence, Cresta codifies the psychology, behavior, and language that top contact center agents use to achieve successful outcomes. And once this expertise is learned, Cresta re-distributes it to every agent in real-time, which effectively turns every agent into an immediate expert. The software continues to learn and adapt over time thus enabling agents to more quickly adapt to changing customer and business needs. And this results in hundreds-of-millions of dollars in incremental revenue driven by the software.
“The last major technology revolution out of Stanford’s AI lab was the foundational tech for self-driving cars which led us to think, ‘Where could we have an even bigger impact based on the amount of time that people spend their day?’” said Enam. “When we learned it takes 7 months for contact center agents to ramp up with an average tenure of only 11 months, we knew we had to start there.”
Agents use Cresta’s product for handling conversations based on what an expert would say in the same situation. And the suggestions are learned based on data from hundreds of thousands of historical conversations and Cresta continues to learn from expert agents over time.
“Zayd and Tim are visionary co-founders who are solving the fundamental human problem of how expertise is gained and shared,” said Thrun. “In the lab, Zayd built early versions of Cresta that doubled the throughput of partner sales teams and increased effectiveness by 54%. When we saw those results, we knew we were on to something huge. I can’t wait to see how Cresta grows from here.”
The company’s technology offers personalized coaching, which makes it automated and continuous by identifying each agent’s strengths and weaknesses based on industry best practices and existing quality assurance guidelines. From there, it then provides real-time coaching guidance during each conversation to result in behavior changes in a fraction of the time.
“Contact centers are undergoing a significant transformation as AI automates basic tasks and agents need to be upskilled to better focus on interactions with customers,” added Greylock Partners general partner Saam Motamedi. “Cresta’s technology improves contact center agents’ effectiveness and accelerates productivity, and enables the companies using them to deliver differentiated customer experiences. We’re thrilled to partner with Zayd, Tim and Sebastian as they grow their solution for this important market shift.”
At the browser level, workflow automation can be integrated with a dozen fragmented software pieces that contact center agents spend the bulk of their day interacting with. And it helps agents handle common workflows like placing orders and looking up customer information without having to switch software platforms.
A market-leading financial services company is utilizing Cresta to double conversion and help agents rapidly gain expertise ahead of their busy season. And in just 5 weeks of using Cresta, new agents were already performing at veteran levels — which is a process that took as long as 7 months before.
“For any sales organization, the question is always how do you make every salesperson as good as the best one,” explained Ben Horowitz, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz and an early investor in Cresta. “This is very much a human enhancement problem and Zayd, Tim, and Sebastian are the right team to tackle it. We are thrilled to partner with them on this endeavor.”
