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There’s no fun interacting with a bot as a customer when it’s clearly a bot you’re engaging with.
Rasa is a startup that claims it has developed the infrastructure to give developers in large enterprises the ability to create “robust” generative conversational AI assistants so that those interactions feel more personal and meaningful to users. It says it does this by providing the infrastructure CALM (Conversational AI with Language Models) and a low-code user interface.
Its technology has helped it win many big customers, primarily in the financial services and telecommunications sector. Those customers include two of the world’s top three banks, the two largest banks in the United States, American Express and Deutsche Telekom, among others.
Founded in 2016, Rasa started as an open source platform for developers to build chatbots, voice apps, and other services that use conversational AI for interactivity. The company claims that since then, Rasa has been downloaded more than 50 million times by developers.
A few years ago, the startup recognized an opportunity to help enterprises build better engagement with their customers. Former Oracle CEO Melissa Gordon was brought in to help lead that new strategy. Gordon, who was a pole vaulter for many years in a sport when it was not a women’s sport and used Title IX to compete on a men’s team, said she likes to “challenge the status quo.”
“We’ve been very vocal from the beginning about challenging some of the established ideas about how chatbots should be built,” said co-founder and CTO Alan Nicol.
The move appears to have benefited Rasa, which says it “almost doubled” its annual recurring revenue (ARR) in 2023 compared to the previous year. That traction helped it secure $30 million in Series C funding co-led by Stepstone Group and PayPal Ventures, with participation from existing backers Andreessen Horowitz (A16Z), Accel, and Basis Set Ventures. The company declined to disclose the valuation and said it was higher than its valuation. Raising $26 Million Series B,
There’s no doubt that this place is hot – and getting increasingly crowded. TechCrunch reported on Tuesday range of mountainsA conversational AI startup founded by former Salesforce co-CEO Brett Taylor and former Google employee Clay Bever, which claims its software can actually take actions on behalf of the customer.
The juice is different, Nicole said, in that it All about agents,
What both companies have in common is that they both claim to address the issues nightmareWhere a large language model sometimes creates an answer when it lacks the information to give an accurate answer.
Rasa claims this is unique because it lets businesses “leverage the full power of LLM to understand the language in a really nuanced way, without opening themselves up to these types of risks.” In other words, it says it uses LLM to understand users rather than guessing business logic or leading the conversation so enterprises can maintain control over how conversations happen and what their bots say.
This is a bold claim.
But as a result, Gordon says, the bots that Rasa’s infrastructure helps develop don’t feel like branded bots.
“A classic use case is a customer-facing flagship assistant, and typically, when these teams come to Rasa, it’s usually not their first rodeo,” Nicholl said. “They are on another platform or they have tried to create everything in house. And then at some point, they run out of capacity, and then they look for something that’s more scalable.”
Image Credit: feel
Bots have external use cases ranging from checking account balances to transferring money. For example, in the case of Deutsche Telekom, bots can help reset a router if someone has internet problems at home, Gordon explains. Notably, this investment is PayPal Ventures’ first investment in AI. In a written statement, partner Alan Du said: “At PayPal we have seen how Rasa’s technology improves customer engagement and business performance through our concierge solutions, and we are making our first AI investment in Rasa because “We believe this is the best platform for enterprises to develop robust conversational AI.”
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