Conversica, the US-based developer of an artificial intelligence-powered sales assistant, received $34m in series B funding on Wednesday from investors including human resources provider Recruit Holdings.
Providence Strategic Growth Capital Partners, an affiliate of private equity firm Providence Equity Partners, led the oversubscribed round, which also featured Toba Capital, Kennet Partners, company founder Ben Brigham and an $8.5m investment by Wellington Financial.
Conversica has built an AI-equipped assistant that aids salespeople by automatically contacting, engaging and verifying and leads through naturalistic, automated two-way email conversations. The software is used by 16,000 people across more than 1,000 businesses.
The funding will be used to support company growth and will be filtered into sales, marketing and product development. It follows a $16m investment by growth equity firm Kennet Partners in 2013, when Conversica was still known as AVA.ai.
Alex Terry, CEO Conversica’s chief executive, said: “Sales and marketing professionals at over 1,000 organisations have already achieved tremendous productivity enhancements by deploying our service.
“We are confident that our unique AI technology will be deployed across a broad spectrum of customer engagement functions to automate and improve many important business conversations.”