AI platform for chat Parloa has raised $66 million in a Series B funding round, a year after the German startup raised $21 million from a group of European investors to fuel its international expansion.
The company is particularly focused on the US market, where Parloa opened an office in New York last year — it says the hub has helped it sign up “several Fortune 200 companies” in the region. For its latest installment, Parloa has secured Altitude chapter as lead backer, a US-based VC firm known for its previous investments in Uber, Airbnb, Snowflake, Twilio and HubSpot.
AI and automation in customer service is nothing new, but with a new wave of large language models (LLM) and productive AI infrastructure, truly intelligent “conversational” AI (ie, not dumb chatbots) is firmly in place again focused on investors. Established players continue to raise significant amounts, such as Kore.ai which closed a massive $150 million funding round a few months ago from big names like Nvidia. Elsewhere, entrepreneur and former Salesforce CEO Bret Taylor launched a new customer experience platform called Sierra, based on the idea of ”AI agents,” with $100 million in VC backing.
Parloa is well-positioned to take advantage of the “AI with everything” hype that has reached fever pitch over the past two years as companies look for new ways to improve efficiency through automation.
Parloa was founded by Germany in 2018 and has already secured high-profile clients such as the European insurance giant Swiss Life and sporting goods retailer Decathlonthat use the Parloa platform to automate customer communications, including email and instant messaging.
However, “voice” is where co-founder and CEO Malte Kosub believes Parloa stands out.
“Our strategy has always been centered around ‘voice first,’ the most critical and impactful aspect of the customer experience,” Kosub told TechCrunch via email. “As a result, Parloa’s AI-powered voice conversations sound more human than any other solution.”
Parloa Platform Image credits: Parloa
Co-founder and CTO Stefan Ostwald says AI has been a key part of Parloa’s DNA since its inception six years ago, using a mix of proprietary and open source LLMs to train models for speech-to-text use cases.
“We’ve trained a variety of speech-to-text models on phone audio quality and customer service use cases, developed a custom phone infrastructure to minimize latency—a key challenge in voice automation—and a proprietary LLM agent framework for customer service,” he said.
So far, Parloa has raised about $25 million, most of which came through its Series A round last year. And with another $66 million in the bank, it is well-funded to double its growth in both Europe and the US, with Kosub noting that it has tripled revenue in each of the past three years.
“We successfully entered the US market in 2023 — we have always had confidence in the excellence and competitiveness of our product, but the overwhelming and rapid success it achieved in the US exceeded everyone’s expectations,” said Kosub.
In addition to lead investor Altimeter, Parloa’s Series B round included cash contributions from EQT Ventures, Newion, Senovo, Mosaic Ventures and La Familia Growth. Today’s funding brings Parloa’s total capital raised to date to $98 million, following a $21 million Series A funding round led by EQT Ventures in 2023.
