Encore AI, a startup that studies companies’ customer interactions and trains and deploys AI voice agents that can work alongside customer support and sales teams or operate autonomously, has raised $30 million in a Series A round led by Team8.
Founded as Insait IO in 2022 by CEO Dvir Pinzburg, the company got its start building recommendation software for financial advisors and relationship managers. Now rebranded as Encore AI, the startup has expanded its system into a platform that analyzes conversations between a company’s employees and customers to identify approaches that have delivered successful results, and used the results to train AI agents.
The result, Ginsburg said, is an AI agent that leverages the most powerful parts of the playbooks used by an organization’s employees.
“Sometimes our agents will even tell a joke that a relationship manager is telling, or give an anecdote or an example that a relationship manager is saying, because we’re literally running from a playbook that we’ve confirmed is working (…) The agents that we build are a package of many different playbooks that have worked throughout the process,” he told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview.
Ginzburg calls this process “interaction mining.” The company’s platform collects call recordings, emails, and text messages and connects that information to CRM systems. Next, break down the customer interaction into stages and try to find out which parts of the conversation helped move the process forward and which parts failed.
This allows Encore agents, and by extension, their customers, to know what works best for a particular customer or interaction. This is because employees can be more or less effective at different points in the sales and customer success process. Ginsburg told TechCrunch.
The company’s platform also enables companies to identify gaps in existing customer support and sales processes, identify inefficiencies and friction points, and find critical issues.
Encore says its agents can not only communicate directly with customers via voice or text, but also act as assistants to employees, recommending actions and tactics during conversations.
Gintzberg said the company has more than 40 corporate customers around the world, the majority of which are financial institutions. He said Encore’s annual recurring revenue has increased more than five times since raising a seed round less than 18 months ago, but declined to disclose exact revenue numbers or valuations.
Encore is early in this market, but its share could become harder to defend as major CRM providers like Salesforce, SAP, Zoho, and HubSpot are able to build similar AI capabilities around customer data. But Ginsburg argues that access to data alone is not enough. Existing vendors will need to overhaul their processes to base their agents on past customer conversations, as Encore does.
“The biggest companies we compete against don’t see[conversation]history as a data point that they’re using. For them to start requesting conversation data with current employees, they’re going to have to change their entire implementation stack and technology stack,” he said.
Planven, Lukatz and Garage also participated in the round, as well as some banks and insurance companies. Encore said some of the financial institutions participating in the round first used its product before deciding to invest.
The startup plans to use the proceeds from its Series A to expand its sales operations in the U.S. and roll out its platform to more large financial institutions.
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