Uniphore Raises $140 Million in Series D Funding as Demand Skyrockets for Enterprise AI and Automation Solutions

Uniphore, an early leader in Conversational Service Automation (CSA), today announced it has raised $140 million in Series D funding, bringing the total funds invested in the company to $210 million. This latest round of financing was led by Sorenson Capital Partners. It includes additional new investors from Europe and the Middle East, Serena Capital and Sanabil Investments, and strategic investor, Cisco Investments. Further expanding their previous investments in Uniphore, March Capital Partners, National Grid Partners, Chiratae Ventures, Iron Pillar Fund, and Sistema Capital also participated in the Series D offering.

The new round of funding is Uniphore’s largest to date. The funding will be used to extend Uniphore’s technology and market leadership in AI, Automation and Machine learning across the enterprise. This will also include a focus on video-based AI applications stemming from Uniphore’s acquisition of Emotion Research Labs earlier this year as well as applications in Trust, Security and RPA markets.
 
Also announced today is the appointment of Rob Rueckert, Managing Partner at Sorenson Capital Partners, to the Uniphore Board of Directors. Mr. Rueckert is an experienced technology-focused executive who brings a strong background in both product innovation and growth.
 
Massive Opportunity

With the market for digital transformation accelerating, Uniphore has announced several strategic partners and customers this past year. These wins essentially enable Uniphore solutions to empower and improve hundreds of millions of customer engagements with its innovative artificial intelligence (AI) and automation software. Uniphore’s solutions help organizations manage and analyze contact center engagements, providing a better customer experience, ultimately driving better business results.
 
“Given the rapid digital transformation happening across the enterprise, the need for automated and intelligent solutions to help drive new business models has never been greater. We saw this years ago and have been delivering innovation to areas such as contact centers, to enable better customer experiences. With our recent acquisitions of RPA and video AI technology, we alone can deliver a conversational service automation platform for the modern Enterprise, combining conversational AI and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) across voice and video-based engagements,” said Umesh Sachdev, CEO and co-founder of Uniphore. “This injection of capital and new addition to our board leadership will fuel our growth, position us to outpace the competition and help transform business through dramatically improved customer experiences.”
 
2020 accelerated digital imperatives for every company and put the focus directly on AI and Automation to drive that transformation of what experts agree is projected to be more than a $500 billion market opportunity. As evidence of this trend, market data shows organizations increased their reliance on contact center agents to service customer needs remotely in the wake of the global pandemic and regional stay-at-home orders.
 
Uniphore has capitalized on this incredible momentum over the past 12 months and expects to have $100M in contracted annual recurring revenue (ARR) in fiscal 2022 based on a forecast of continued hypergrowth.
 
In the last year, Uniphore won significant deals including some of the world’s largest telecom providers, insurance companies and financial service organizations. Additionally, they have also won customer contracts with customer experience (CX) providers including Tech Mahindra, NTT DATA, Sitel, Firstsource, and WNS. These deals and others can support over 75,000 customer service agents who can handle approximately 160 million engagements every month. Uniphore also expanded employee headcount last year with the addition of more than 100 new employees globally, including former PwC Partner Stéphane Berthier as its Chief Financial Officer. It is on track to hire more than ­­300 employees this next fiscal year.
 
Stephane Berthier, Uniphore CFO added, “Contact centers are focused on providing excellent customer service and efficiency through AI and automation. With more than 1.15M agents employed globally as well as increased focus on agent support and digital customer service, the market opportunity is stronger than ever before. Today’s announcement of additional funding confirms the considerable interest in this space and will support our strong growth expected in the next year and beyond.”
 
"As a leading investor in transformational enterprise technology, we were very impressed by the Uniphore team and what they have been able to do for customers and the broader market," said Rob Rueckert, Managing Partner at Sorenson Capital. "We are excited to back Uniphore and believe 2021 will be a breakout year of innovations and tremendous progress in transforming CX for the Enterprise."

Uniphore Establishes a Global Ecosystem of Innovation, Collaborates With Worldwide Innovators on Future of Contact Centers

Uniphore, an early leader in Conversational Service Automation (CSA), has teamed up with global leaders, including Idiap Research Institute and Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IITM), and has joined the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Global Innovators Community – an invitation-only group of the world's most promising start-ups and scale-ups that are at the forefront of technological and business model innovation.
 
The multiple agreements entail the development of next-generation capabilities in advanced AI, machine learning, automation, and voice and video technologies to really drive the transformation of contact centers and enterprises around the world.
 
Uniphore and Idiap will work together on new opportunities in both development and longer-term activities that focus on cutting-edge speech recognition algorithms, spoken language understanding, and multimodal integration of real-world signals for improved detection of emotion and other semantic and pragmatic applications. Ultimately, the application of these new capabilities will generate actionable insights to enhance customer experience (CX) and reduce costs of support.
 
Likewise, Uniphore also believes preparing the next generation of professionals and investing in its current workforce is an important step in ensuring a future-ready, healthy, and dynamic ecosystem. Uniphore and IITM, specifically the Telecom Center of Excellence (TCOE) are collaborating to upskill employees and better prepare students for future careers. Uniphore employees will gain access to a variety of short-term certification programs and graduate-level courses, while the institute’s students will be supported with real-world case studies and collaborative research projects. These opportunities will enable students to gain valuable experience working on transformative areas such as AI, Automation, NLP, Machine Learning and Conversational Analytics. 
 
As a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Innovator Community, Uniphore will help define the global agenda on key issues with a particular focus on shaping the future of technology governance – Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. The platform brings together key stakeholders from the public and private sectors to co-design and test policy frameworks that accelerate the benefits and mitigate the risks of AI and ML. The project areas include standards for protecting children, creating an AI regulator for the 21st century, and addressing the unique challenges of facial recognition technology.
 
“It is in Uniphore’s cultural DNA to innovate and collaborate; and associating with these global organizations is a testament to our core values. It will be truly exciting to see the level of scale, agility and sheer innovation that will come out of these global collaborations,” said Umesh Sachdev, CEO and Co-founder of Uniphore. “Through our initiatives with the research and educational institutes, we will not only learn from each other and drive innovation, but these relationships will help create a world-class talent pool, tasked with transforming customer experience.”
 
Samith Ramachandran, SVP and Head of Technology at Uniphore said, “It is exciting to see both academic and world thought leaders come together and collaborate with Uniphore. We are thrilled to have such a strong network of professionals working towards common business and societal goals. At Uniphore, we thrive on innovation and there is no better time or place to be for new ideas, and technological innovation than right here, right now.”

Uniphore and Tech Mahindra Partner to Drive Innovation in Customer Experience

Uniphore, an early leader in Conversational Service Automation (CSA), today announced that it has entered into a multi-year, multi-million dollar strategic agreement with Tech Mahindra, a leading provider of digital transformation, consulting, and business re-engineering services and solutions to expand its global reach and drive IT innovation in the contact center as the industry adapts to an increasingly digitalized and remote work friendly environment.

 
As part of the agreement, Tech Mahindra and Uniphore will offer joint customers access to both Uniphore’s cutting-edge CSA platform and Tech Mahindra’s data and analytics expertise across multiple industries and verticals – bringing the next generation of Customer Experience to enterprise businesses and consumers around the world.
 
“Customer experience is more important now than ever before. In an uncertain world, consumers need brands to address their needs quickly and efficiently,” said Umesh Sachdev, CEO and co-founder at Uniphore. “At Uniphore, developing innovative technology that addresses the varied needs of businesses, call center agents and consumers has been in our DNA since day one. By joining forces with one of the world’s largest BPOs, we’re able not only expand our reach, but also leverage the innovations Tech Mahindra’s team have developed as a result of their unique expertise. We are looking forward to a long and successful relationship.”
 
“Every industry – from telecom to banking to retail – is thriving with opportunity in customer experience. We have already seen a trend towards digital transformation of the industry, and recent events have accelerated the need. It’s time to make sure businesses are prepared for what the future holds,” said Ritesh Idnani, President, Business Process Services, Tech Mahindra. “As part of our TechMNxt charter, we are focused on leveraging next gen technologies, and through this partnership with Uniphore we look forward to optimize business processes and lower costs, while still improving the experience for consumers.”
 
This partnership will have far reaching benefits for customers that will impact not only how they do business now as they continue to adjust to the current global situation, but also in the long term. These significant benefits include:

• Reduced Costs: Uniphore enables contact center agents to be their best by delivering real-time alerts, and automating call summarization as part of the after-call work process. By combining the power of AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to automate these processes and more, auMina is able to reduce time and error rates when closing out transactions – ultimately improving businesses’ bottom lines.
• Improved Customer Satisfaction: Uniphore and Tech Mahindra are able to deliver agents personalized insights for each consumer. With better, contextualized insights available at their fingertips, agents can better address their customers’ needs. Similarly, analytics and insights from automated after call work can help businesses easily identify and address business processes to further improve the overall experience.
• Better Security for Work from Home Agents: With a large percentage of agents no longer working in a highly controlled call center environment, businesses need to be able to protect agents and the consumers who call them. With Uniphore, Tech Mahindra customers will have access to advanced biometrics capabilities that ensure the correct agents are logging in and protect the personal data of all involved. 

“As Uniphore continues to grow, we want to empower a global business transformation in customer experience. Forming a strategic partnership with Tech Mahindra was an obvious step toward accomplishing this goal,” said Jafar Syed, Chief Growth Officer at Uniphore. “Their vast global presence, experience in key vertical markets and expertise in data and analytics, coupled with Uniphore’s unique CSA technology, will ultimately drive innovations that position businesses not just for today’s world, but for the future."

Uniphore’s Conversational Service Automation Platform to be Leveraged for WNS' EXPIRIUS

Uniphore, an early leader in Conversational Service Automation, today announced that it will be providing its advanced conversational service automation platform to WNS, a leading Business Process Management (BPM) company, for its recently-launched digital CX Solution, EXPIRIUS.

WNS will leverage Uniphore’s AI and automation capabilities to offer unique digital Customer Experience (CX) solutions integrating human-assisted design and domain expertise through EXPIRIUS.

“The message coming in from customers is loud and clear. They want better experiences. Yet, current economic and societal challenges are preventing organizations from meeting those demands in a cost-effective manner,” said Umesh Sachdev, CEO and co-founder of Uniphore. “WNS’ global expertise and their new CX solution, combined with our AI and Automation-driven technology platform can truly transform the industry.”

“It is our constant endeavour to understand our customer’s domain and co-create impactful solutions that can transform their businesses with agility and excellence. Our promise of outperformance stems from our deep domain expertise, partnership approach and a global delivery network,” said Keshav Murugesh, Group CEO, WNS. “We will be able to further strengthen our customer service capabilities with Uniphore’s offerings and deliver exceptional experiences to clients,” he added.

WNS will be able to accelerate customer response management, automate processes that will optimize efficiencies and reduce costs while enhancing customer experience by utilizing Uniphore’s Real Intent^TM solutions.

“In today’s world, customer support needs are constantly evolving and new levels of capability and technology are required for success,” said Jafar Syed, Chief Growth Officer for Uniphore. “This strategic partnership with WNS brings the benefits of their global expertise and our industry-leading technical capabilities that will ultimately help drive business transformation by delivering new customer experiences.”

Uniphore Appoints Annie Weckesser as Chief Marketing and People Officer

Chennai and California-based Uniphore, the global conversational AI technology company, announced today it has expanded its leadership team and appointed Annie Weckesser as Chief Marketing and People Officer. In this role, Weckesser will lead all aspects of Uniphore’s global marketing and communications, as well as the company’s talent strategy and management.

For the past three years, Weckesser was part of the leadership team at NIO, a next-generation car company, leading U.S. communications from startup to IPO. Prior to NIO, Weckesser held various strategic communications and marketing roles for nine years for Cisco, the global technology giant. Throughout her career, she has counselled and partnered with some of the world’s most senior corporate and government leaders and their teams.

Based in California, Weckesser’s new leadership role underscores Uniphore’s goal to expand the business within the U.S. market and its commitment to building a strong culture for over 150 global employees. With more than 15 years of marketing and communications experience, Weckesser is perfectly suited to not only build on the success Uniphore has seen since its inception in 2008 but also contribute to future growth.

“I am thrilled to welcome Annie to our executive team,” said Umesh Sachdev, Co-founder and CEO, Uniphore, of Weckesser’s appointment. “We are in hyper-growth mode and her extensive marketing and communications experience – as well as her track record for building great teams – is exactly the kind of expertise we need to bring Uniphore to the next level. Having Annie on-board will help us to achieve success across the markets we serve.”

“I am excited to join Uniphore and help the team enter this next growth phase,” said Weckesser. “I look forward to building exceptional customer service experiences for our clients through our innovative technology. We will focus on attracting and retaining great talent to lead an industry that is increasingly driven by automation and AI.”
About Uniphore

Uniphore is a global Conversational AI technology company. Uniphore’s vision is to redefine the customer service experience of the future through AI enabled Conversational Service Automation. Uniphore enables businesses globally to deliver transformational customer service by providing an integrated suite of software products for Conversational Analytics, Conversational Assistant and Conversational Security. It has offices in USA, Singapore and India.

[Via Business Wire India]