India's Uniphore raises $400m Series E
New Enterprise Associates (NEA) has led a USD 400m Series E round for Uniphore, an India and US-based artificial intelligence (AI) technology developer focused on speech recognition.
US-based March Capital and other unnamed existing investors also participated at a valuation of USD 2.5bn. Uniphore was valued at USD 650-700m as recently as February last year.
The round brings the company's total funding to USD 610m, including a USD 140m Series D last year led by Sorenson Capital Partners and featuring March, India’s Chiratae Ventures and Iron Pillar Capital, and several VCs from the US, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and France. March led a USD 51m Series C in 2019.
“As we continue to operate in an increasingly virtual work model, technologies like Uniphore’s are a necessity for organizations that want to unleash their competitive advantage and take their business to the next level,” said Hilarie Koplow-McAdams, a US-based venture partner at NEA, said in a statement. She will join the Uniphore board.
Uniphore was incubated in 2008 at IIT Madras, an Indian research institute, and positions itself as the global leader in “conversational automation,” an industry estimated to be worth USD 500bn. It develops voice recognition AI systems to support customer engagement in more than 100 languages, analytics and security procedures, as well as two-way dialogue systems that can detect emotion in the user’s voice.
The idea is that poor customer experience is a financial drain on the corporate sector that could worsen as consumer demands become more complex. The automation of conversations in areas such as sales, after-sales services, HR, and education is said to not only increase efficiencies but allow companies to recognise customers’ true intent and predict behaviour.
Uniphore claims to be rapidly growing its customer base, which currently includes the likes of Allstate, BNP Paribas, UPS, Accenture, Nationwide, Tech Mahindra, Fannie Mae, and DHL.
Recent initiatives include the acquisitions of Spain-based Emotion Research Lab and Israel-based Jacada. Emotion Research Lab focuses on AI to identify emotion and engagement levels in real-time over video, while Jacada specialises in workflow and desktop automation systems, including interactive voice response technology.
The Series E capital will be used to develop Uniphore’s technology around voice AI, computer vision, and tonal emotion, as well as to expand operations in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific. There are currently about 600 employees across India, Singapore, Japan, the US, Spain, and Israel.
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