With all the buzz about the modern technology with AI and VR that seem to be taking the world by surprise one after another, it has become imperative for companies to keep up with these trends and make the most of it. To sufficiently provide a solution to this, Akash Singh, Sharath Keshava Narayana, and Swapnil Jain launched Observe. AI in 2017.
Observe.AI is an AI-powered agent enablement platform for voice customer service. Leveraging the latest speech and natural language processing technologies, Observe.AI enables organizations to quickly analyze 100% of calls. With Observe.AI, support teams improve call quality, monitor compliance, and coach agents into top performers. Observe.AI’s main aim is to transform the $300B voice customer service industry by turning every agent into your best brand representative through AI-based insights and coaching. In a digital world, agents provide a rare opportunity to humanize brands and improve the customer experience, Observe.AI wants to accomplish this through this venture.
| Startup Name | Observe.AI |
|---|---|
| Headquarter | San Francisco, CA |
| Sector | Analytics, Voice AI |
| Founders | Akash Singh, Sharath Keshava Narayana, Swapnil Jain |
| Founded | 2017 |
| Parent Organization | Z21 Labs |
| Website | www.observe.ai |
About Observe.AI and How it Works
Observe.AI – USP and Innovation
Observe.AI – Target Market Size
Founders of Observe.AI and team
How was Observe.AI Started?
Observe.AI – Name, Tagline, and Logo
Observe.AI – Startup Launch
Observe.AI – Funding and Investors
Observe.AI – Advisors and Mentors
Observe.AI – Growth
About Observe.AI and How it Works
Observe.AI is a Voice AI platform that transcribes and analyzes 100% of voice customer service calls by using the latest Speech Recognition, Natural Language Processing, and deep learning technologies. This solves several problems for Contact Centers:
- Fixing a broken Quality Assurance system: On average, only .003% of calls are reviewed for quality and compliance purposes. With Observe.AI, 100% of calls are analyzed. Additionally, with Voice AI call scoring is objective and data-driven (rather than randomly selecting calls to review, which is how the process works today).
- Compliance & Security: The platform automatically identifies violations in compliance. Additionally, features like automatic PII redaction protect sensitive user data.
- Targeted agent enablement and coaching: Voice AI enables supervisors to provide targeted, data-driven feedback to agents. On average, our customers provide 10X more feedback to agents per MO and have reduced onboarding time by more than 20%.
- Operational improvements: With Voice, AI companies improve key contact center metrics, such as improving CSAT (5%); lowering Average Hold Time; lowering Dead Air; and improving the Quality Analyst to Agent ratio
- Understanding the VoC to improve Customer Experience: Sentiment analysis via Voice AI helps companies understand how customers feel about the support experience and its products/services with objective proof.
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Observe.AI – USP and Innovation
Legacy speech analytics and talent management systems are simply not meeting the needs of the world’s top brands. Today’s Voice Customer Service agents have a unique ability to emotionally connect with customers and are often a brand’s only frontline representatives. Observe.AI strives to turn every agent into the best possible brand representative through AI-based insights and coaching. The prime USP’s of Observe.AI include:
- Built for Contact Centers: We offer the highest transcription accuracy in the Contact Center Space (80%, which is higher than Google and Amazon for Contact Centers). We’ve built our entire Platform around the Contact Center use case.
- Rapid integration: We are the quickest solution to go live in the Speech Analytics Contact Center industry. Our customers go live in just two weeks and we offer one-click integration with Talkdesk in an industry where it can take 3MO+ just to get up and running.
- Proprietary SpeechNLP: Our engineering and Machine Learning teams have rolled out some truly ground-breaking features for Sentiment Detection, Silence Detection, and automated Redaction on calls.
Observe.AI – Target Market Size
- Industry: Voice Customer Service
- Target Market Size: $300B
Advancements in Natural Language Processing, Speech Recognition, and deep learning will only continue to dramatically improve. This will increase transcription accuracy while opening up new opportunities to automate tedious processes, such as compliance tracking and quality evaluations. It will also open up new opportunities to augment agents with conversational insights on live calls in 2020.
With these advancements, support teams will be able to use Voice AI more efficiently and intuitively than ever immediately putting the data to practical use. With more voice data, support teams will be able to better understand performance trends and make predictions. New integrations and alliances will also help teams leverage learnings from Voice AI across other channels, including email and chat.
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Founders of Observe.AI and team
- Swapnil Jain, Co-founder & CEO: Swapnil is an IIT Delhi graduate and comes with a strong technology background. Before Observe.AI, he led user growth at Twitter and opened Twitter’s India office. As CEO at Observe.AI, he focuses on product innovation.
- Sharath Keshavanarayana, Co-founder & CRO: Sharath is a second-time entrepreneur with over 14 years of experience in building and managing global sales teams at Unbxd, AWS, and Akamai. As the CRO at Observe.AI, he focuses on go-to-market functions, such as sales, marketing, and Customer Success.
- Akash Singh, Co-founder & CTO: Akash is an IIT Delhi graduate and has both high-tech and startup experience. He works from Bengaluru and manages the engineering team.
How was Observe.AI Started?
In 2017, the co-founders Swapnil and Akash had a hunch that advancements in Speech, Natural Language Processing, and AI were opening up new opportunities across every industry and vertical. When they took a trip to the Philippines, these two entrepreneurs happened to realized that they could use these technologies to transform the way work is done by the world’s 100M contact center agents.
In 2017, they brought in co-founder Sharath who has many years of experience working in Contact Center software. During an early trip to Manila, they were shocked to see how inefficient agents were working because of outdated processes and technologies. That’s because Contact Centers typically quality check just 1-2% of their total calls. That means agents, who take an average of 1000 calls per month, only receive feedback on 2-4 of those calls each month that are typically randomly selected.
In the Philippines, the co-founders saw that many teams were using multiple systems and spreadsheets just to quality check a single call. At a time when 1 out of every 2 customers goes unsatisfied with their experience, they knew there was a massive opportunity to make life better for both Contact Center employees and their customers. And hence they validated the idea for Observe.AI when the co-founders landed their first 100 clients and drove multi-million revenue in 9MO
Observe.AI – Name, Tagline, and Logo
The tagline of Observe.AI is “Turn every agent into your best brand representative with Voice AI.” That’s because the ventures believe that agents are the voice of the brand, and they interact with customers and prospects more often than anyone else at an organization.
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Observe.AI – Startup Launch
Observe.AI is a product-centric company, and it has built a world-class AI Platform. The numbers don’t lie and this AI-powered agent happens to have an 80% transcription accuracy (vs. industry-average 75%), 80% silence detection (vs 72%), and 87% sentiment analysis (vs. 78%).
“We also take onboarding and customer success very seriously. We get our customers to live quicker than anyone else in our industry (two weeks versus the typical 3MO) and offer dedicated onboarding, Customer Service, and ongoing training.” Said one of the co-founder – Swapnil.
Finally, Observe.AI has the unique advantage of having built several alliances early-on with companies like Talkdesk, Microsoft, and leading BPOs (ERCBPO and ItelBPO).
Observe.AI – Funding and Investors
Over the years, Observe.AI has raised a huge amount of funding. In August 2017, it raised $ 900K in the pre-seed round from Emergent Ventures. Again in January 2018, it raised an amount in the same round worth $120K from Y Combinator. Nexus Venture partners invested $7.1 Million in the seed round in May 2018. Recently in December 2019, it raised Series A funding worth $26.2 Million from Scale Venture Partners.
| Date | Stage | Amount | Investor |
|---|---|---|---|
| August 2017 | Pre-Seed | $900k | Emergent Ventures |
| January 2018 | Pre-Seed | $120k | Y Combinator |
| May 2018 | Seed | $7.1 Million | Nexus Venture |
| January 2018 | Series A | $26.2 Million | Scale Venture Partners |
Observe.AI – Advisors and Mentors
- Andy Vitus, Partner, Scale Venture Partners
- Jishnu Bhattacharjee, Managing Director, Nexus Venture Partners
- Dick Costolo, Founder 01 Advisors, / Ex-CEO Twitter
Also Read: Success Story of Knowlarity- The First Ever Cloud Telephony Venture of India!
Observe.AI – Growth
- Company size: 52
- Work culture: Observe.AI has built one of the most diverse teams in the Bay Area and have a global culture that spans San Francisco, Bangalore, and Dallas, Texas. Two of the company values are trust and transparency. Critical information about the business and learning is shared at every level, and the top-level management trusts every employee to make the best decisions in their role/own their responsibilities.
- Hiring: Observe.AI is hiring for roles across every department in our Bengaluru, San Francisco, and future Dallas office.
- Funding: With the recent $26 Million Series A round, the total funding stands at $34.3M.
