Ada, the leader in Automated Customer Experience (ACX), today announced it has raised $44 million in a Series B funding round led by Accel, with participation from existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, FirstMark, Version One, Leaders Fund and Burst Capital. Ada helps business leaders such as AirAsia, Mailchimp, Shopify, Telus, Upwork and Zoom reduce costs and increase satisfaction across more than 30 million personalized customer conversations annually via an AI chatbot built on its ACX platform. The company will use the investment to scale the platform, deepen its AI leadership and provide enhanced functionality across traditional business silos, including helping organizations optimize operations by benchmarking efficiency gains against customer satisfaction.
Ada’s platform gives business users and non-technical users the ability to improve, tweak and enhance AI capabilities through a no-code drag-and-drop interface to deliver best-in-class results. According to MarketsandMarkets, the size of the chatbot market is expected to grow from $2.6 billion in 2019 to $9.4 billion in 2024, as the customer service center software market grows to $35 billion by 2023. Gartner predicts that by 2025, customer organizations that embed AI in their customer engagement platform will boost operational efficiency by 25 percent.
“Although AI gets thrown around a lot in the enterprise, we are focused on companies offering solutions that are driving real business value, and Ada is doing exactly that. Ada is breaking through the crowded market of chatbots to define a new category of automated customer experience that can manage far greater customer inquiry volumes while delivering some of the strongest customer satisfaction scores we’ve seen,” said Ben Fletcher, partner at Accel. “By uniting automation, personalization, speedy implementation and a no-code platform for non-technical users, Ada delivers compelling value that’s rapidly attracted blue chip customers around the world. Ada is an impressive testament to the tremendous AI innovation and leadership going on outside of Silicon Valley in Canada and beyond. As we face a new era of economic uncertainty, Ada is uniquely positioned to help companies strengthen customer relationships and deliver impressive long-term value even as they may face limited resources.”
Ada’s applied AI uses machine learning to increase accuracy over time and strengthen the performance of all Ada customers’ chatbots. With customers in industries from fintech and retail to telecom and software, Ada can train the chatbot to understand and address topics specific to each business while getting up and running in weeks, not months. A proprietary Natural Language Understanding engine enables the chatbot to comprehend meaning and context without perfectly constructed sentences, allowing it to navigate around jargon, typos, spelling errors and more than 100 different languages.
In measures of both accuracy and predictability, Ada’s machine learning platform outperforms well-known vendors on the market by an average of 14 percent. These innovations have reduced customer wait time up to 98 percent, solved more than 70 percent of customer inquiries instantly and achieved customer satisfaction scores of 90 percent. Ada also improves live agent happiness and retention by empowering support teams to own the bot development process.
“Our founding team spent over a year in the trenches of customer support and saw firsthand that existing solutions just couldn’t scale in the face of soaring ticket volumes and sky-high customer expectations,” said Mike Murchison, co-founder and CEO of Ada. “We designed Ada to help customer service teams take advantage of all the benefits of automation without sacrificing the personalized touches that are so essential to winning loyal, long-term customers. Ada will use this investment to lead the next phase of this market, extending our best-in-class AI with the aim of delivering personalized experiences across all customer properties, while providing more tools to help businesses better calibrate their customer service strategy and optimize their bottom line.”
