Kore.ai is one of the fastest-growing AI companies globally and has a track record of delivering generative and conversational AI platforms and solutions responsibly and safely. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Kore.ai founder and CEO Raj Koneru to learn more about the company.
Raj Koneru’s Background
What is Raj Koneru’s background? Koneru said:
“Since receiving my Master’s degree from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, in 1991, I have spent over 30 years as a serial entrepreneur, founding multiple companies and taking two public via NASDAQ. Among these was Kony, the market leader in mobile app development, which I took to acquisition by Temenos, a company specializing in enterprise software for banks and financial services. Over the last three decades, I have witnessed many technological revolutions, spanning the internet, mobile, cloud, and now AI.”
Formation Of Kore.ai
How did the idea for the company come together? Koneru shared:
“I founded Kore.ai in 2014 to create a conversational AI-first platform (well before even the conversational AI term was coined) for enterprises. I recognized the potential of AI to transform user experiences early on, anticipating the power of conversational AI (CAI) and, most recently, the disruptions from generative AI (GenAI) and LLMs as opportunities for innovation.”
“As Founder and CEO, I drive Kore.ai’s vision and strategy, leading the company to excel at delivering innovative conversational and generative AI platforms and solutions. Kore.ai has consistently earned top recognition from prominent tech and industry analyst firms such as Gartner, Forrester, IDC, ISG, Everest, Celent, G2, and others for the past several years. Notably, Kore.ai holds the coveted position of being a Gartner Magic Quadrant leader in the Enterprise Conversational AI Platforms category for two consecutive years and was named a leader in the Forrester Wave Conversational AI for Customer Service 2024.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Koneru explained:
“Kore.ai provides enterprise-grade no-code advanced AI platforms and solutions to help companies of all sizes safely and responsibly power business interactions with AI to achieve desired business outcomes. From conversational virtual assistants to GenAI applications, Kore.ai’s differentiated platform offers purpose-built workflows, highly configurable tools, and a flexible, open architecture that are collectively recognized as the leading approach by customers and analysts. This empowers teams to craft custom solutions or deploy pre-built, domain-trained intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs) across industries such as banking, healthcare, retail, and travel, and in functional roles such as IT, HR, sales and marketing, procurement, and others, to offer extraordinary experiences to customers and employees and accelerate time-to-value. Rising above the infrastructure clutter and LLM chaos, our open approach grants businesses freedom of choice with built-in guardrails for effective and responsible AI implementation.”
“Our newest platform, GALE, a generative AI platform, will enable enterprises to design, build, test, and deploy end-to-end applications with enormous simplicity and flexibility. It is capable of accelerating GenAI development by up to 70%.”
In addition, our platform upgrade XO V11.0 enables businesses to put IVAs to work 10 times faster. It brings together conversational AI, contact center AI, advanced retrieval augmented generation (RAG), an XO GPT module, insights and cognitive search capabilities in a unified interface. We also just launched RecruitAssist, an AI-powered recruitment solution helping recruiters validate AI-generated resumes by ensuring their authenticity and providing real-time support during interviews.
Challenges Faced
What challenges have Koneru and the team faced in building the company? Koneru acknowledged:
“The most pressing challenge is to operate and innovate in a market that is seeing unprecedented rapid growth and disruption driven by advancements in technology. This changes users’ as well as buyers’ expectations, and necessitates a broader integration of new AI capabilities that are evolving each day. Kore.ai has overcome these challenges by taking advantage of the strengths of the technology while avoiding security, privacy and compliance pitfalls.”
“Another challenge I have seen is that many organizations have misplaced expectations about GenAI and LLMs. While there is no doubt that they offer exciting opportunities for innovation and progress, it is essential to understand their limitations and use them responsibly. A significant hurdle is the difficulty in identifying the right use cases and driving tangible ROI, often stalling efforts to move from pilot phases to production and scale. As we continue to push the boundaries of these models, it is crucial to keep in mind the ethical implications of their development and use.”
Evolution Of Kore.ai’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Koneru noted:
“So much has happened in the last 10 years. Kore.ai has transitioned from a growing startup to a mature and stable company that has strengthened its position in a fiercely competitive industry where many struggle to achieve profitability.”
“Being a customer-centric company, we have always recognized the potential of new innovations and embraced them early on to help address enterprise needs. We have empowered our customers to leverage tech innovations while ensuring our platform technology and solutions remain relevant. In 2014, we set out to create an end-to-end conversational AI-first platform for enterprises to build IVAs that automate employee and customer interactions. During this time, our focus was to offer the best of the best NLP and ML technology to understand user intent and thereby provide the most appropriate responses. CAI could redefine the user experience and revolutionize how businesses interact with their customers. Today most applications adopt a conversational interface to help enterprises automate business interactions or drive better experiences.”
“Well before ChatGPT was formally launched, we started working on LLMs and generative AI technology to roll out a series of innovations like a smart copilot, zero-shot/few-shot learning, assisted dialogs, GenAI-enabled testing, and much more. This reduces the overall effort required for AI bot development by at least 70%, accelerating time-to-market from days to just a few hours.”
“Other Kore.ai tech advancements include our proprietary purpose-driven fine-tuned models within XO GPT, helping enterprises get started quickly and reliably without worrying about external LLMs. Our advanced retrieval augmented generation (RAG) tooling powers contextual cognitive search capabilities to provide relevant responses (answers) to customer queries and employee requests. We have also built a full-fledged CCaaS offering and Agent AI capabilities.”
“Lastly, understanding the need for quick ‘value realization,’ we offer domain-trained, highly customizable, ready-to-deploy pre-built solutions for various industry verticals like banking, healthcare, retail, food, and travel as well as employee-focused functions like HR, IT support, and others. This has not only expedited adoption but also provided opportunities for expansion.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Koneru cited:
“In January 2024, we announced a $150 million strategic growth investment led by FTV Capital with participation from NVIDIA and existing investors. This funding is accelerating our market expansion and continuous innovation in AI (including GenAI-powered solutions) to deliver tangible business and human value at scale.”
“In 2024, Kore.ai celebrates a decade of innovation, four consecutive years of triple-digit revenue growth, and an impressive milestone of surpassing 1,000 employees worldwide by year’s end.”
We marked one year of our global partnership program now with 500+ certified partners taking Kore.ai products and technology to their customers.
Customer Success Stories
After asking Koneru about customer success stories, he highlighted:
“A top health insurance provider in North America, which received thousands of member calls daily, faced significant delays and high demands on its contact center agents. By leveraging Kore.ai’s Experience Optimization Platform to develop a 24/7 visual IVR assistant, it saw a massive transformation in customer satisfaction and agent productivity. Since its deployment, the visual IVR assistant handles over 1,000 daily queries, has achieved a 90% containment rate, and has tripled the speed of response, significantly reducing member wait times.
The same company has also implemented GenAI-powered automated call summaries, saving over a million seconds per month, reducing AHT, and having consistent call summaries for trend analysis and training or corrective actions.”
Funding/Revenue
When asking Koneru about the company’s funding and revenue details, he revealed:
“Kore.ai has raised $250 million to date from strategic investors, including Nvidia, FTV Capital, Vistara Growth, Sweetwater PE, NextEquity, Nicola, Beedie, PNC Bank, and more.”
“Kore.ai has achieved triple-digit YoY growth for the past four years. Its current ARR is north of $100 million for FY 23-24. We are aiming for continued growth for the next fiscal year.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Koneru assessed:
“Gartner estimates the conversational AI market is projected to reach $36 billion in revenue by 2032, up from $8.2 billion in 2023, led by growth in advanced virtual assistants and IoT device integrations. And Bloomberg Intelligence estimates the generative AI market to reach $1.3 Trillion by 2032.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Koneru affirmed:
“From the beginning, Kore.ai has focused on building an end-to-end platform that powers an array of pre-built, customized solutions. This unique approach enables our customers to quickly start building on our platform and effortlessly scale at their own pace, ensuring they can adapt and grow without constraints. This choice has led to acquiring marquee customers and achieving 100% year-on-year growth in revenues over the past four years.”
“Unlike others in the field, Kore.ai offers unparalleled flexibility. Our platform-driven approach allows for various deployment options—including on-premises, cloud, VPC, and hybrid—and grants the freedom to choose from any LLM options, whether open-source, commercial, fine-tuned, or pre-built. With advanced model orchestration and the flexibility to pick your own LLM model and deployment options, Kore.ai provides an open architecture that allows organizations to customize and extend use cases to fit their specific needs. Additionally, our no-code/low-code platform enables organizations to deploy pre-built solutions and customize new use cases, automations, and responses at a global scale. We also ensure seamless integration with most enterprise systems and compliance with global and regional standards. Another important differentiation is our Responsible AI framework and guardrails for GenAI, providing controls to organizations for response validation, while mitigating privacy and data protection risks.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future goals? Koneru concluded:
“Kore.ai’s main goal is to ease the adoption of generative AI while democratizing AI technology and giving enterprises a practical way to put it to productive and profitable work. The same technology that is trusted and used by large enterprises should be easily accessible to small and medium businesses. So, we are focused on simplifying the onboarding process and on our product-led growth in the SMB segment. We also launched our brand new platform, GALE, which enables enterprises to build and deploy generative AI applications easily and safely. We are rolling out more industry-and-function-focused pre-trained solutions. Our pipeline has expanded to 5x its size compared to this time last year, and we will grow our global partner network to 1,000+ partners, which is a testament to the increasing demand and our commitment to meet the needs of the enterprise market.”
