- AI-powered call tracking and conversational analytics company Invoca announced it raised $56 million in funding
Invoca — a leader in AI-powered call tracking and conversational analytics — has announced it raised $56 million in funding. Including this funding round, Invoca has raised a total of $116 million in total funding. This round of funding was led by existing investor Upfront Ventures and new investor H.I.G. Growth Partners with participation from Accel and Morgan Stanley Alternative Investment Partners.
“With digital advertising spend expected to near $400 billion next year, marketers are investing heavily in Google and Facebook to drive awareness and customer acquisition,” said Invoca CEO Gregg Johnson. “Yet over 90% of commerce still happens offline via contact centers and retail stores, especially in industries with more complex, expensive products. Brands are struggling to connect digital advertising investments to the human conversations that drive sales. Invoca addresses this gap and is helping sophisticated marketers like Dish Network drive a 60% increase in conversion rates and 15x lift in conversions.”
This round of funding comes on the heels of the company seeing 75% year-over-year bookings growth in the first half of 2019. And Invoca serves marketers at leading brands like Dish Network, U.S. Bank, Dignity Health, and Gusto, and continues to deepen strategic partnerships with Google, Facebook, Adobe, and Salesforce. With this round of funding, Invoca plans to double headcount over the next three years.
“Invoca made a huge leap by applying AI to sales calls. Marketers now discover the ‘purchase intent’ of consumers similar to how valuable it is knowing the terms a lead has typed into a Google search,” added Mark Suster, managing partner at Upfront Ventures. “With computers in every customer’s pocket, calls have become an insanely important marketing channel for every brand.”
Plus Invoca plans to use the funding for accelerating the development of its award-winning products and broaden its ecosystem of partners in digital advertising, marketing technology, CRM, and affiliate marketing. And earlier this month, Invoca released Signal Discovery — which uses a proprietary unsupervised machine learning model for analyzing buying conversations between consumers and experts in the contact center.
This platform helps marketers understand the factors affecting consumers’ intent to buy such as competitive promotional campaigns. And marketers can apply these insights to drive more revenue-generating calls, boost conversion rates, and improve the buying experience.
“We’re coming into an era where technology is being used to enable and improve human connections, instead of replacing them,” explained Scott Hilleboe, managing director at H.I.G. Growth Partners. “Invoca is at the forefront of this shift, giving marketers the tools to uncover and act on conversational insights in a way that is simple and scalable, similar to what they’ve been doing on the digital side for years. Given H.I.G.’s extensive investment experience in digital media, analytics, and call centers, we quickly recognized the incredible power and value of Invoca’s technology. We are truly excited to co-lead this round and usher Invoca into its next phase of growth, building on its already impressive business momentum and customer-first culture.”
