Tuesday, 30 January 2024, Bengaluru, India
The enterprise-focused conversational AI and GenAI startup Kore.ai said today that it has raised $150 million in a funding round led by Nicola, Beedie, FTV Capital, Nvidia, Vistara Growth, Sweetwater PE, and NextEquity. Co-founder and CEO Raj Koneru said the firm has raised about $223 million. The additional funds will be used for product development and hiring more people for Kore.ai.
(Image Source: Techcrunch.com)
After founding Kony, a mobile app development startup, and several other minor businesses, such as the outsourcing company Touchpoint and the IT consultancy Intelligroup, Koneru founded Kore.ai in 2014. He claims that after witnessing the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) and huge language models (LLMs) similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT to revolutionize user experiences, he was motivated to start Kore.ai.
Koneru emailed that “the tech landscape turned out to be very chaotic and uncertain due to rapid advancements with the introduction of GenAI and LLMs.” “There were more questions than answers, but I saw an opportunity for innovation in conversational AI and LLMs.”
Since GenAI is a relatively new field, Kore.ai wasn’t creating GenAI products in 2014. However, Koneru claims that by making significant investments in text-generating and -analyzing models, the company was laying the groundwork for future GenAI products.
“Kore.ai’s platform includes intelligent virtual agents, AI for contact centers, agent AI, and search and answer features for various use cases related to employee and customer experiences,” Koneru stated. Furthermore, the needs of particular industries and enterprise operations are addressed by Kore.ai’s range of industry and horizontal solutions.
Check out Giga ML, which provides tools to assist businesses with deploying LLMs offline, and Acree, which provides a platform for creating corporate GenAI apps. Recently, Reka and Contextual AI came out of stealth to assist in building customized AI models for businesses. Fixie is developing tools to facilitate firms’ coding on top of LLMs.
According to Koneru, Kore.ai gives businesses great flexibility regarding where and how they can deploy their AI applications: locally, in the cloud, or on virtual machines. They also offer a high degree of fine-tuning capability. Koneru argues that Kore.ai’s specialty, fine-tuned models, are more efficient and better than larger, more potent models from vendors such as Anthropic and OpenAI for specific applications like text summarization, finding and generating answers, topic discovery, and sentiment analysis.
An argument for privacy can also be made for offline, smaller models.
According to a 2023 Predibase survey, over 75% of businesses said they won’t be using commercial, cloud-hosted LLMs in production because they are concerned about sensitive data being compromised by the models. In a different survey conducted by data research company CensusWide and GenAI platform Portal26, 85% of organizations expressed concern about the privacy and security issues associated with GenAI.
Additionally, Koneru claims that, unlike some competitors, Kore.ai allows businesses to grow their AI usage into new and varied fields and scale it up as needed.
“Kore.ai, with its platform-driven approach, sits above the infrastructure and fragmentation of all the LLM layers, offering freedom of choice with built-in guardrails for effective AI implementation,” Koneru continued.
It’s debatable now to what degree these qualities set them apart. Robust scaling options for building conversational AI and GenAI apps are provided by vendors like Google Cloud, Azure, and AWS, and Kore.ai is not the only platform that enables users to deploy models in a variety of local and cloud computing settings.
However, Orlando, Florida-based Kore.ai has made a significant impression in the cutthroat AI business, whether due to its platform’s strength, roughly 1,000-person workforce, marketing strategy, or all three. The company now has more than 400 brands (including PNC, AT&T, Cigna, Coca-Cola, Airbus, and Roche). It generates over $100 million in recurring revenue annually thanks to usage, license fees, and consulting services.
The fact that funding for GenAI businesses is still plentiful helps. A new poll conducted by London-based data analytics and consultancy business GlobalData indicates that in 2023, GenAI startups raised a record $10 billion, an increase of 110% over 2021.
In a statement, Kapil Venkatachalam of FTV Capital continued, “Although the market for advanced AI has increased in recent years, many businesses are having difficulty implementing AI responsibly and efficiently throughout their whole organization. The open platform strategy adopted by Kore.ai to leverage AI models, scalability, vertical-specific out-of-the-box applications, and low-code/no-code capabilities impressed us. This puts them in a solid position to capitalize on the increasing demand from international brands seeking cutting-edge AI solutions to improve business interactions and generate value.
(Information Source: Techcrunch.com)
