Last week Voximplant, a US-headquarter provider of innovative CRM solutions, announced it raised $10 million from Baring Vostok and RTP Ventures. Baring Vostok is the leading Russian PE and VC firm, which sadly made the headlines this year with the arrest of its US founder Michael Calvey in Moscow. The RTP Ventures fund is a subsidiary of RTP Global (previously known as Ru-Net), an international VC firm backed by Russian billionaire Leonid Boguslavsky.
Founded in Russia in 2013 and also known as Zingaya, Voximplant has developed a next-gen cloud-based development environment for CRM applications. Its communication platform as a service (CPaaS) allows companies to “build leading edge applications” for cloud call centers, interactive voice response (IVR) with voice recognition, unified communications, programmable call back, voice notifications, and others.
Voximplant operates across such market verticals as banking, marketing, e-commerce, logistics and others. It claims to support more than 600 million calls per year with 20,000 paying customers. Among these are such companies as 8X8, Kentucky Fried Chicken, S7 Airlines, Home Credit Bank and Atlassian.
Voximplant says its platform “provides deep application control, while speeding development of communications applications and minimizing overhead.” What is more, Voximplant makes wide use of such artificial intelligence and speech recognition and other high-tech approaches.
For example, Voximplant’s ‘Smart IVR’ uses AI, speech recognition and natural language understanding to “efficiently handle phone calls, providing fast and convenient responses to customers” — nothing short of “automating business communications with IVR,” the company claims.
This tool allows callers to interact with the IVR in their normal speaking voice while “eliminating the need to use keypad input and overly complicated menu prompts.” This technology is also capable of recognizing caller intent. Some operations to be “entirely conducted without a live agent;” but if the call requires an operator at some point, the IVR solution will route it to an employee from a relevant department.
AI differentiation
Among Voximplant’s competitors are such major players as Plivo, Sinch and Twilio. In an exchange with VentureBeat, Tony Jamous, a successful tech entrepreneur from the industry, said that Voximplant’s extensive suite of services and datacenter network “pit it favorably against the competition.”
“The market is still in its infancy, shifting from the early adopters — digital-first businesses such as Uber and Airbnb — to the early majority. Enterprises now realize that they must use APIs to modernize the way they engage and communicate with their customers,” Jamous was quoted as saying. “Robust communication API platforms such as Voximplant can play a critical role in enabling this customer engagement transformation,” added Jamous, who co-founded Nexmo and sold it in 2016 for $230 million.
“Voximplant’s unique, serverless platform consistently beats other CPaaS providers in head-to-head competition for one simple reason: Businesses and developers using Voximplant deliver differentiated services to the market faster,” said Alexey Aylarov, Voximplant’s CEO and co-founder.
“Our growth rate has been phenomenal over the past few years, averaging 100% revenue growth. With our highly engaged customer base and continuing track record for innovation, we see an opportune moment to expand into the North American market which we expect will allow us to book more than $100 million in annual revenue within just a couple of years,” Aylarov added.
Voximplant’s fresh funding will fuel the young company’s global expansion “with an initial focus on North America.” Additional geographies are also considered.
Matvey Vinokurov, investment manager at Baring Vostok, will join Voximplant’s board of directors and Kirill Sheynkman, founder and senior managing director of RTP Ventures, will join as a board observer. The Untitled, a Russian VC fund which backed Voximplant at an earlier stage, made an exit during the round.
