India, US-based Usher closes $50m Series C
Third Point Ventures has led a USD 50m Series C round for India and US-based enterprise artificial intelligence (AI) and automation technology provider Ushur.
Iron Pillar, 8VC, Aflac Ventures, and Pentland Ventures joined the round. It follows a USD 5m Series B in 2021 led by Iron Pillar and featuring Aflac. 8VC led a USD 12m Series A in 2018.
Ushur claims to use conversational AI, language intelligence and document understanding to deliver industry-specific, hyper-personalised customer experience support services. The idea is that enterprises have a massive appetite for improving customer experience to maintain market position and when combined with automation, this creates financial value.
The offering includes a no-code platform said to enable non-technical users in more than 60 languages to visually create sophisticated AI-powered workflows for automating tasks such as claims processing and appointment scheduling. Target industries are often highly regulated, such as healthcare, insurance and financial services.
Customers include Aflac, Cigna, CVS, Irish Life, United Healthcare and Unum Group. Usher claims these companies have improved customer engagement rates by as much as 85%, reduced email triage times from five days down to five minutes and slashed customer issue resolution times by as much as 90%.
There has been significant traction in the past 12 months, with headcount tripling, the customer base doubling, and the net revenue retention rate reaching 164%. Last October, Ushur partnered with the AWS marketplace to provide a healthcare-industry customer experience platform.
The company will use the latest round to enhance its platform with technologies including systems known as large language models and generative AI, a branch of AI that is able to create new content as opposed to simply making predictions. There are also plans to move into new regions and industry verticals.
“As enterprises in verticals such as insurance, healthcare and financial services run into the limits of the previous generation of business process automation, we see Ushur’s user experience-focused, AI-driven platform delivering massive value to their customers,” Rob Schwartz, a managing partner at Third Point, said in a statement.
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