FOSTER CITY, CA—August 31, 2017—Conversica, the leader in conversational AI for business, today announced a record-breaking first half of the company’s fiscal year, with accelerated growth in bookings and revenue, major new capabilities in its AI platform, significant additions to the company’s management team, and continued acknowledgement of its leadership through industry awards and analyst recognition.
Conversica automates business conversations through virtual assistants powered by artificial intelligence. The company’s flagship AI Sales Assistant engages every lead in a human conversation to qualify more of them for sales, freeing sales reps to spend more time closing business. In the first half of 2017, more Conversica customers than ever employed their AI Sales Assistants to engage and qualify leads and create sales opportunities more quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively.
This year, Conversica continued its tremendous growth and celebrated many notable milestones:
- Increased annual recurring revenue by over 50 percent, with sales to new customers and significant expansions in existing accounts.
- Grew the customer base to over 1,200 companies, adding customers in a variety of industries, such as technology, financial services, education, hospitality and automotive. New customers include Box, New Relic, Microsoft, Northwestern Mutual, Salsa Labs and Avalara.
- Released significant new AI capabilities—including support for conversations via text/SMS messaging, new assistant languages (Spanish and French) and automated meeting scheduling—and processed more than 250 million messages.
- Expanded its executive management team with the addition of Dr. Sid J. Reddy as Chief Scientist, Brian Kaminski as Chief Customer Officer, and Victor Belfor as Senior Vice President of Business Development.
- Added key new employees in engineering, data science, operations, customer success and sales to grow the company to over 160 employees.
- Earned the Red Herring Top 100 award, distinguishing the company as one of the Top 100 private technology companies in North America.
- Named for a second time to the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest growing private companies.
Conversica’s Sophisticated AI Sales Assistants Attract Customers Across Industries
Conversica increased its customer base this year across a diverse set of B2B and B2C industries, including technology, financial services, education and automotive, bringing the total roster of clients to more than 1,200, many of which added more salespeople to handle the increased flow of opportunities identified by their AI Sales Assistants.
“A record number of global enterprises across a dozen industry verticals chose Conversica’s category-leading AI solution, and they did so because of the incredible ROI they are able to achieve,” said Conversica CEO Alex Terry. “Conversica’s AI Sales Assistants continue to help salespeople across industries follow up on their leads far more effectively, and our AI Assistants are now deployed in other departments and communicating in multiple languages. Moreover, the recent additions we’ve made to our executive team will boost our pace of innovation, extend our reach and ensure that we continue to serve each of our customers well, even as we continue our accelerated growth.”
Notable new customers and those which significantly expanded their usage include:
- Epson, which generated millions in sales pipeline from their Conversica AI Assistant
- ScaleArc, which saw a 30x increase in influenced pipeline
- SecureAuth, which added $2M in new pipeline in less than eight months
- Top Hat, which achieved 200% ROI on Conversica-handled opportunities
“Our research reflects accelerated adoption and deployment of AI-based resources for marketing, sales and customer support activities,” explained Dan Miller, Lead Analyst and Founder, Opus Research. “Intelligent assistants, like those offered by Conversica, support measurably positive business outcomes by boosting productivity and lowering costs while supporting high levels of customer satisfaction.”
Conversica Unveils Enhancements to Industry-First AI Assistants
Conversica has expanded its Conversational AI platform with new capabilities and customer-requested features each month. Key enhancements include the ability to deploy AI Assistants with multiple names, titles, email addresses and phone numbers to conduct multiple conversations across multiple business functions, in multiple languages, across multiple communications channels.
- New Multiple Assistant Capabilities: Leveraging the experience and technology underpinning the company’s successful AI Sales Assistant, Conversica added AI assistants capable of automating important business conversations in service, finance, customer success and recruiting. Increasingly, organizations deploy a single Conversica platform that delivers multiple assistants with conversations optimized for separate business functions. Each assistant benefits from the training, experience, insight and results gained from the thousands of other assistants in the field across all customers, resulting in more engaging and helpful conversations than are possible in a stand-alone manner.
- New Conversations in Multiple Languages: Conversica’s AI Assistants now engage individuals in human-like conversations in English, Spanish and French and are intelligent enough to automatically switch languages mid-conversation when appropriate. Since business conversations occur in many different languages, even within a single country or region, Conversica AI Assistants now engage each individual in their preferred language. Conversica assistants are already trained on millions of human conversations to achieve an unprecedented level of accuracy and reliability, and the company has expanded its team of conversation designers and trainers with native speakers to develop new capabilities and ensure high levels of AI accuracy.
- New Communication Channels: Conversica added SMS/text messaging as the next communication channel for its AI Assistants. This feature allows assistants to communicate with leads via email and SMS, even switching channels mid-conversation to best satisfy the needs of the lead while maintaining compliance with regulations such as the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). Each lead’s contact information and communication preference is always passed to the salesperson for appropriate follow-up and to the dozens of CRM and marketing automation solutions with which the company’s products are integrated.
Three New Executives Join Conversica’s Leadership Team
Conversica has made three key appointments to bolster its executive team, tapping industry veterans with public and private company experience to help lead the company through this period of accelerated growth. New appointments include:
- Dr. Sid J. Reddy, Chief Scientist. Reddy is a noted expert, author and speaker in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and computational linguistics. He joins Conversica from Microsoft, where he was a Principal Applied Scientist. Prior to Microsoft, he founded an NLP lab at Northwestern University. He has designed, developed and contributed to dozens of NLP systems used in production in a wide array of use cases and industry verticals, including business intelligence, legal, healthcare, life sciences, and e-commerce.
- Brian Kaminski, Chief Customer Officer. Kaminski is an accomplished customer success expert with 20 years of experience rapidly scaling winning teams. Kaminski comes to Conversica from IBM, where he served as a worldwide client success executive and developed the strategy for customer success across IBM’s multi-billion-dollar SaaS portfolio. Prior to that he was Chief Customer Officer at Marin Software.
- Victor Belfor, Senior Vice President of Business Development. Belfor has more than 15 years of go-to-market strategy and execution experience and joins Conversica from OpenSesame, where he managed partnerships ranging from Oracle and SAP to Workday, Cornerstone and OnDemand. Prior to that he established the partnership programs for Ring Central, helping to accelerate growth prior to the successful IPO.
Additional Information
- Read press releases on new executives Dr. Sid J. Reddy, Brian Kaminski and Victor Belfor
- Access biographies and pictures of Conversica’s management team
- Review 30+ case studies and video case studies that explain deployment details and ROI results, published with customers in multiple industry verticals
- See Conversica’s conversational AI explained in this two-minute overview video
- Track milestones in the company’s history
- Hear Conversica speak at the upcoming Opus Research Intelligent Assistants Conference in San Francisco, September 18-19
About Conversica
Conversica is the leader in AI-powered business conversations and the only provider of AI-driven lead engagement software for marketing and sales organizations. The flagship Conversica® AI Sales Assistant helps companies find and secure customers more quickly and efficiently by automatically contacting, engaging, qualifying and following up with leads via natural, two-way conversations. Used by more than 1,000 companies worldwide, Conversica’s sales assistants are built on a proven AI platform integrating natural language processing (NLP), natural language generation (NLG), and machine learning (ML) capabilities and engage prospects over multiple communication channels and in multiple languages. Recognized by Gartner as a Cool Vendor, Conversica is a portfolio company of Providence Equity, Kennet Partners and Toba Capital and is headquartered in Foster City, California.
To learn more, visit conversica.com and follow the company on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.
Contact:
Sara Black
Bospar
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213-618-1501
