Encore AI has raised $30 million in a Series A funding round. The round was led by venture capital firm Team8.
The startup builds AI voice agents that work alongside customer support and sales teams. These agents can also operate on their own without human help.
Encore AI was founded in 2022 under the name Insait IO. CEO Dvir Ginzburg started the company to build recommendation software for financial advisers and relationship managers.
The company later changed its name to Encore AI. It expanded its original software into a full platform for training AI agents.
How the AI Agents Learn
Encore AI studies conversations between employees and customers. It looks at calls, emails, and text messages to find out what works and what does not.
Ginzburg calls this process interaction mining. The platform connects these conversations with a company's customer relationship management system.
The system breaks each customer interaction into stages. It then studies which parts of a conversation helped close a deal, and which parts caused a customer to walk away.
Ginzburg said the AI agents copy the best techniques used by top performing employees. He said the agents sometimes tell the same jokes or share the same examples that successful relationship managers use.
"The agent we build is a package of many different playbooks that have worked throughout the process," Ginzburg told TechCrunch.
The platform also helps companies spot problems in their sales and support process. It can point out weak spots and areas where customers run into friction.
Customers and Competition
Encore AI's agents can talk to customers directly through voice or text. They can also act as assistants, suggesting responses to employees during live conversations.
The company has more than 40 enterprise customers around the world. Most of these customers are financial institutions.
Ginzburg said Encore AI's annual recurring revenue has grown more than five times since its seed round. That seed round closed less than 18 months ago.
He did not share exact revenue numbers or the company's current valuation.
Large customer relationship management companies like Salesforce, SAP, Zoho, and HubSpot could build similar tools using their own customer data. Ginzburg said this gives Encore AI an early lead, but that lead could become harder to keep over time.
He argued that having data alone is not enough to compete. Established companies would need to change how they collect and use conversation data, which he said is a big shift for them to make.
Other investors in the round included Planven, Lukatz, and Garage, along with some banks and insurers. Some of those financial companies used Encore AI's product before deciding to invest in the company itself.
Encore AI plans to use the new funding to grow its sales operations in the United States. The company also wants to bring its platform to more large financial institutions in the coming months.
