- Intelligent voice agents leverage proprietary AI to deliver bespoke solutions at scale
- Funding will be used to accelerate product development, make strategic technology hires and expand into UK & Australia
Agara, the startup building the next generation of virtual voice agents for enterprises, today announces a $4.3 million Pre-Series A extension round led by UTEC, the early stage deep-tech venture capital firm associated with academic institutes such as The University of Tokyo. The round also includes participation from existing investors Blume Ventures and RTP Global. This brings the total funds raised by Agara to $7.5m and includes bluechip investors Kleiner Perkins.
Founded by Abhimanyu and Arjun Maheswaran in 2017, Agara develops industry-leading virtual voice agents that leverage proprietary machine learning models to understand intentions in speech, make intelligent decisions to handle queries and talk individual customers through to a resolution. Agara’s voice agents offer a tailored and holistic solution, fielding customer calls, engaging in troubleshooting processes and providing a service extremely similar to human agents.
Agara’s voice agents are also highly conversational and even improve upon traditional human service providers by instantly understanding different accents and dialects, responding instantly to tickets and scaling to meet a high volume of calls.
Agara’s solution is 100% voice focused and has the highest accuracy in identifying speech in the industry. Conversations with its voice agents are organic, do not rely entirely on scripts and are actively driven by customer interactions. This means customers have access to an intelligent customer service operator that can guide them through complex processes.
Agara has been a revenue-generating business since inception and the company now supports some of the largest global enterprises. This includes Procter & Gamble, the American multinational consumer goods corporation, who it helps to process support queries for 160 brands in 10 countries across 3 continents.
The funding will be used to accelerate product development and make a number of strategic hires in Agara’s technology department as well as growing the sales & marketing team in North America. Agara will be growing its AI team from 10 to 20 by the end of 2021 and establish its first pure AI research team. The company will also ramp up its channel partnerships and expand to the UK and Australia.
Abhimanyu, co-founder and CEO of Agara said: “Whether it is sales calls, phone support or product feedback, voice is the top choice for companies around the globe and this trend will very much continue. Until now, virtual voice agents were simply not fit-for-purpose, offering a basic solution for an often complex problem that frustrated customers and companies in equal measure. With our proprietary AI-driven solution, we are finally bringing an intelligent and bespoke customer service product that can scale to meet any demand. This fresh capital injection will enable us to support more companies across the world that are aggressively seeking automated customer service solutions in response to national lockdowns.”
Kiran Mysore, Principal at UTEC added: “As a deep-tech fund, UTEC was impressed with Agara’s autonomous Voice AI agent powered by voice-first Applied ML algorithms and real-world data. Agara’s product-led growth puts them in the pole position to be a category-defining enterprise Voice AI company. We aim to supplement Agara through client and Go- to-market partnerships with Japanese MNCs”
Sanjay Nath at Blume Ventures said: “Autonomous voice has applications beyond customer support and can stretch across industries and functions. We at Blume believe the day isn’t very far where autonomous voice agents will be ubiquitous. The Agara team has showcased tremendous deeptech expertise in building a cutting edge product that has been validated by the likes of P&G. We are very excited to continue supporting the company and help make Agara synonymous with autonomous voice.”
