Parloa secures $66M for Conversational AI
BERLIN, GERMANY — German startup Parloa has raised $66 million in a Series B funding round led by Altimeter Capital.
This fresh investment comes just a year after the conversational AI platform secured $21 million Parloa aims to deepen its foothold in the international market, particularly in the United States.
The company has already onboarded several Fortune 200 companies as clients through its New York office established last year.
Parloa specializes in conversational AI platforms for customer service, aiming to provide intelligent and human-like voice interactions.
Parloa’s “voice first” approach
Parloa’s co-founder and CEO, Malte Kosub, attributes the company’s success to its “voice first” strategy, aiming to deliver the most human-like voice conversations through AI.
“Our strategy has always been centered around ‘voice first,’ the most critical and impactful facet of the customer experience,” Kosub told TechCrunch. “As a result, Parloa’s AI-based voice conversations sound more human than any other solution.”
“AI agents are evolving beyond rigid, script-based voicebots to provide personalized responses and interactions. We make calling companies fun again,” Kosub said in a company statement.
Co-founder and CTO Stefan Ostwald noted that AI has always been an integral part of Parloa’s vision.
“We’ve trained a variety of speech-to-text models on phone audio quality and customer service use cases. We’ve developed a custom telephony infrastructure to minimize latency — a key challenge in voice automation — as well as a proprietary LLM agent framework for customer service,” Ostwald added.
The rise of Conversational AI
Parloa has been using Microsoft Azure for its solutions for several years. It also established strategic partnerships with leading global consulting firms, including KPMG and PwC, to assist enterprises with AI transformation and the implementation of Parloa’s cutting-edge solutions.
The advent of large language models (LLMs) and Generative AI has reignited the focus on truly conversational AI capabilities beyond simple chatbots.
Major industry players like Kore.ai have also attracted significant funding recently, raising $150 million a few months ago to capitalize on this trend.
Also, former Salesforce CEO Bret Taylor recently launched a customer experience platform called Sierra built on the concept of “AI agents.” It has raised more than $100 million from venture investors.
