Conversica – one of the biggest companies that work in the AI and chatbots space announced the completion of a Series C fundraising round, raising $31 million. This funding will be used to help the company expand to new markets and add more features to its platform.
This round was led by existing investor Providence Strategic Growth Capital Partners L.L.C., which also led a $34 million round in the company two years ago. Existing investors Toba Capital and Kennet Partners and new investors CIBC and Savano Capital also participated in this new round. This goes on to show investor confidence in the company.
Conversica crossed an annual run rate of $35 million earlier this year, doubling its annual rate of return over the last two years. To date, the company has raised $87 million in total over the last five years after bootstrapping for the first three of its existence and fending off a number of acquisition approaches from some high-profile suitors.
Conversica’s CEO Alex Terry said that the basic idea of what Conversica does is to be the first point of engagement between a potential lead and the company in text-based interactions over email or SMS messaging, before handing off the relationship to a human. “Our AI sales assistant engages in human conversations with marketing and sales leads to engage and qualify them, and then hand over the most qualified leads to humans to close the deal,” he said.
“We’ve never looked at ourselves as a chatbot,” Terry said, distancing his company from much of the disenchantment we’ve seen with AI-based messaging ‘bots’ that provide automatic responses to users’ questions, which have largely failed to deliver on their promise. “Part of the trick is that we have tried to fix specific problems for specific customers. A chatbot that looks for keywords and parrots back is a frustrating experience. We’ve focused on a full problem and solving that.”
In a blog post, Terry said:
We’re excited to announce that Conversica just won another round of funding. This time, we’ve secured the largest Series C round ever for a Conversational AI company: $31 million!
Our current investor Providence Strategic Growth Capital Partners L.L.C. (PSG), an affiliate of Providence Equity Partners, led the round with participation from our other existing investors Toba Capital and Kennet Partners, and we welcome two new investors CIBC and Savano Capital Partners. This funding round follows $34 million we raised in our Series B round and $22 million we received in our Series A round.
With the Series C funding we just received, we plan to:
- Continue enhancing our award-winning and patented conversational AI platform and suite of AI Assistants
- Grow our Marketing and Sales efforts
- Expand our footprint globally
- Selectively consider additional acquisitions
