Conversational AI firm yellow.ai raises $78.15 mn in Series C round

The company's AI-powered bots deliver automated customer experience on over 35 chat and voice channels, across more than 100 languages, handling over a billion interactions every quarter

Yellow.ai, which provides customer experience automation to brands such as Sephora, Domino’s and MG Motor has raised $78.15 million in Series C, led by WestBridge Capital along with Sapphire Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures. Lightspeed Venture Partners again participated in this round, which brings total funding raised so far to $102.15 million.

The funding would help the firm strengthen its dominant leadership in over 50 countries including India, Southeast Asia, UK, Middle East, and LatAm, and establish a strong presence in the US. It would be adding 70 employees to its 500 global headcount. With the fresh infusion of capital, yellow.ai will deepen investments towards global expansion, hiring top talent across regions, and applied R&D in hyper-automation. 

“Yellow.ai has broken out of the crowded virtual-assistant market with our automation-first with human-assist model, to deliver a higher customer satisfaction and incremental revenue growth to our enterprise clients,” said Raghu Ravinutala, CEO and co-founder of yellow.ai. “With our rapid client and revenue expansion in India and across the world, we’re geared to become the global leader in the CX Automation space and are bullish on building our product, partnerships, teams, and community to truly democratize AI in the near future.”

Currently, the company’s AI-powered bots deliver automated CX on over 35 chat and voice channels, across more than 100 languages, handling over a billion interactions every quarter. Its virtual assistants have been credited with learning customer behavior so precisely, that one international financial services company was able to leverage virtual assistants powered by yellow.ai to generate $100 million in upsell revenue in just three years.

Yellow.ai enables enterprises to leverage its proprietary NLP (natural language processing) engine and platform to build chatbots and voice bots, in over 100 languages. The platform comes pre- integrated with enterprise applications like Salesforce, Shopify, Cisco, Avaya, SharePoint, and 100 more.

Since its prior funding round, yellow.ai has grown 470 per cent in recurring revenue. It secured hundreds of new customers as the company brings automation to the $1.3 trillion support sector and expands its prowess to automate end-to-end commerce, marketing, HR, and ITSM (IT service management).

“What impressed us the most is the speed at which customers deployed yellow.ai for support automation,” said Sumir Chadha, founder and managing partner of WestBridge Capital. “This pattern is a testimony to the platform’s capability of creating an impact across the board thereby becoming a pivotal AI-partner.”

Jai Das, co-founder, president, and partner at Sapphire Ventures, said the firm looked at hundreds of customer service and experience platforms over the years.

“But what caught our eye about yellow.ai was their impressive technology and growth, achieving 4x year over year growth despite the pandemic,” said Das.

The rise in the adoption of AI and the importance of virtual assistants, already recognized prior to the pandemic, continues to accelerate. This is because organizations are challenged with handling increasing customer queries in a digital environment more effectively with existing teams.

For instance, one of the largest globally recognized pizza delivery chains has moved 100 per cent of its customer service to “Dom,” an omnichannel AI assistant developed by yellow.ai on voice and text channels. Dom personalizes offers and recommendations for millions of customers, while reducing customer support resolution time by 70 per cent, resulting in higher CSAT (customer satisfaction) and cost savings for the company.

“Yellow.ai continues to solidify their market leadership in Asia, the US, and beyond,” said Amy Wu, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Dev Khare, partner, Lightspeed India Partners, a long-standing investor in yellow.ai, said that the platform has been tested across several hundred deployments in the most active messaging market in the world, namely Asia.

“Yellow.ai is now continuing its growth through global expansion to North America, Latin America, and Europe,” said Khare.