ASAPP, Inc., the artificial intelligence research-driven company advancing the future of productivity and efficiency in customer experience, announced that it recently completed $185 million in a Series B funding bringing the company’s total funding to $260 million. Participation in the Series B round includes legendary Silicon Valley veterans John Doerr, John Chambers, Dave Strohm and Joe Tucci, along with respected institutions Emergence Capital, March Capital Partners, Euclidean Capital, Telstra Ventures, HOF Capital and Vast Ventures.
“ASAPP builds AI-Native products to solve problems of massive scale and systemic inefficiency. We are thrilled and grateful by this latest investment, which allows ASAPP to continue scaling and meeting the extraordinary demands large enterprises are facing as a result of the global pandemic. Many organizations are experiencing historically high levels of customer interactions at a time when their capacity to support is at an all-time low. By augmenting agents who are on the frontlines, ASAPP enables them to be vastly more efficient and productive, realizing significant savings while delighting customers.” said Founder and CEO Gustavo Sapoznik. “Our current focus is in solving customer experience challenges faced by large enterprises, which for decades has been addressed by attempting to deflect customer calls, and has resulted in poor experiences, frustration, and massive amounts of money being spent on this problem. Our approach to cost savings is radically different and focuses on building state-of-the-art capabilities to make agents better and empower them by augmenting and automating their workflows.” said Sapoznik.
“ASAPP has created an all-in, AI-Native platform which delivers significant savings and a superior customer experience” said investor and ASAPP board member John Doerr. “Gustavo’s world-class team is creating audacious partnerships with large, forward thinking enterprises. We’re excited to be part of the team by backing ASAPP’s vision.”
Customer care and sales agents use the ASAPP platform to know the right thing to say and the right action to take, in real time, as the customer conversation transpires on phone calls and digital messages. ASAPP’s machine learning models are continuously learning and predicting from every customer interaction, effectively turning every agent into your best agent without the need for manual programming or extensive training. Many of the world’s largest companies in telecom, financial services, and travel have realized dramatic improvements to both efficiency and effectiveness in how their agents serve customers today.
The company has seen a massive increase in interest for their platform in recent weeks. The Coronavirus pandemic and resulting economic recession are creating significant disruption at contact centers across all industries. Historically, the execution of efficiency measures – more call deflections, hiding contact information from customers, frustrating chatbots that cannot handle complex transactions – has come at the expense of customer satisfaction. Customer Experience Officers are looking for fast improvements to their operations, to drive significant automation without sacrificing customer experience. ASAPP is uniquely designed to deliver this promise, not by traditional means, but by radically improving agent labor efficiency and effectiveness with artificial intelligence. ASAPP customers have achieved a 2.5x agent throughput increase, while realizing a 45%-100% improvement in customer satisfaction scores as a result of using the platform.
With ASAPP, for the first time what is right for the company in the form of lowering costs and improving efficiency, is now also right for the customer: fast, accurate issue resolution and superior experience.
In 2015 ASAPP decided to tackle its first chosen field—customer experience. The product vision required to truly transform these operations were beyond existing capabilities. As a result, ASAPP formed a large AI research team composed of PhDs and leading experts in the field to further advance disciplines such as natural language processing, machine learning, and speech recognition which serve as the foundation for ASAPP products.