Image credits: Parloa // Founders Stefan Ostwald and Malte Kosub (CEO)
Conversational AI platform Parloa has secured a $66 million Series B round, a year after raising $21 million from a number of European investors to fuel international growth.
The German company is particularly focused on the United States, opening an office in New York last year. The company says the hub has helped it secure deals with “several Fortune 200 companies” in the region. In its latest round, Parloa secured Altimeter Capital, a US-based VC firm known for investments in Uber, Airbnb, Snowflake, Twilio, HubSpot, and more, as lead backer.
AI and automation in customer service isn't new, but a new wave of large-scale language models (LLMs) and generative AI infrastructure is enabling truly smart “conversational” AI (i.e., not a dumb chatbot). ) is once again attracting investor attention. Established players continue to raise large sums of money. For example, Kore.ai a few months ago completed his massive $150 million funding from big-name backers such as Nvidia. Elsewhere, entrepreneur and former Salesforce CEO Brett Taylor launched Sierra in February, a new customer experience platform built around the concept of an “AI agent,” and received $100 million from venture investors. Raised more than $1,000.
Parloa is well-positioned to take advantage of the “AI and all-inclusive” hype that has been gaining traction in recent years as businesses seek new ways to improve efficiency through automation.
Founded in 2018, the startup has already won high-profile customers such as European insurance giant Swiss Life and sporting goods retailer Decathlon, both of which automate customer communications such as email and instant messaging. We are using the Parloa platform for this purpose.
But co-founder and CEO Malte Kosub believes what sets Parloa apart is its voice.
“Our strategy has always been centered around the most important and impactful aspect of the customer experience: 'voice first,'” Kosub told TechCrunch via email. “As a result, Parloa's AI-based voice conversations sound more human-like than any other solution.”
Co-founder and CTO Stefan Ostwald says AI has been core to Parloa's DNA since its founding six years ago. The company uses a combination of its proprietary and open-source His LLMs to train models for speech-to-text use cases.
“We have trained a variety of speech-to-text models for telephony voice quality and customer service use cases. We developed the telephony infrastructure and our own LLM agent framework for customer service,” he said.
Parloa has raised about $25 million to date, the majority of which came through a Series A round last year. With an additional $66 million now in the bank, there is enough money to double growth in both Europe and the United States. Kosab noted that the company has tripled its revenue in each of the past three years.
“We successfully entered the US market in 2023. We have always been confident in the excellence and competitiveness of our products, but the overwhelming and rapid success we achieved in the US exceeded everyone's expectations. We exceeded that,” Kossab said.
In addition to lead investor Altimeter, Parloa's Series B included checks from EQT Ventures, Newion, Senovo, Mosaic Ventures, and La Familia Growth. Today's funding brings the company's total funding to $98 million and follows a $21 million Series A led by EQT Ventures in 2023.