Parloa – a Berlin-based enterprise software provider – is a company that puts a halt to endless wait times and subpar customer service bots. And the company has just completed a successful round of financing at 20 million Euros in backing from leading investors led by prestigious firm EQT Ventures and including new funding from existing investors Newion and Senovo.
Parloa’s natural-sounding and always-accessible AI speech application ups the ante on automated spoken customer communication. And this investment will accelerate the company’s expanding international footprint.
Over $400 billion dollars are spent every year to operate customer contact centers around the world with companies struggling to find technology to create more efficient customer service operations. However, automated customer service remains a frustrating experience for everyone involved and Customers are annoyed by long queues and “bad bots,” while companies struggle to provide a positive customer and employee experience in the face of a labor crunch.
Using Parloa’s platform, companies can scale, conducting thousands of customer conversations at the same time. Plus Parloa’s AI can communicate in natural language can solve inquiries on its own and remove frustrations associated with inflexible and highly-scripted response systems. This relieves contact center agents of their most mundane and repetitive tasks and offers them the freedom to concentrate on more complex, high-touch, and high-value interactions.
The Parloa platform combines everything companies need to use artificial intelligence in customer service from speech recognition to natural voices. And it offers an intuitive, user-friendly interface that can be operated without programming knowledge.
Parloa essentially combines a multitude of AI components, including its own AI modules as well as large language models like Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) via Azure OpenAI Service. And with Parloa organizations can easily customize their experience to company-specific needs and knowledge thus adapting to function most efficiently in their own workflows.
Along with EQT Ventures, investors from previous financing rounds continue to invest in the growth of Parloa. And this includes the venture capital funds Newion and Senovo as well as founders from numerous German unicorns such as Erik Muttersbach and Michael Wax (Forto), Hanno Renner (Personio) and Nicolas Peters (Signavio), German contact center entrepreneur Jens Bormann (Muuuh! Group) and soccer professional and business angel Mario Götze.
KEY QUOTES:
“Our platform is already demonstrating the tremendous value AI tools bring to customer service — in very simple, groundbreaking ways. This represents a huge opportunity for companies, their employees, and their customers — and shows the immediate applicability and value of AI. Customer contact is a multi-billion dollar global market – and one of the first to be disrupted by AI,” said Kosub. “We have found an experienced international investor in EQT Ventures, who are actively supporting our further development and global expansion.”
“The operational business units are immediately able to develop the solutions themselves, without the need of engineers.”
— Malte Kosub, CEO of Parloa, who founded the German company in 2018 with Stefan Ostwald
“A new era is beginning for the contact center industry. We believe that AI for customer communications will become one of the largest software markets in the world in the coming years. We are excited by Parloa’s team and convinced that Parloa’s unique technology will make a significant contribution to innovation in customer communications. I am pleased to be part of this exciting development.”
— Doreen Huber, Partner at EQT Ventures
“Microsoft and Parloa share a commitment to help empower customers to revolutionize customer service with sophisticated digital solutions. With the global scale and advanced AI capabilities in Azure, Parloa and our joint Digital Contact Center Platform customers will see tangible business value.”
— Charles Lamanna, Corporate Vice President, Business Applications & Platform at Microsoft
