Image Credits: Aisera

“In some ways, Aisera competes with ServiceNow and Zendesk, but it’s also complementary to those solutions as we partner with them as well as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Salesforce, Atlassian, and Cisco,” Sudhakar said. “Aisera is unique and differentiated with ontology and taxonomy for each domain and vertical industry … [We also do] AI learning and training on customer data sets to capture specific intents, phrases, utterances required for

Aisera, a startup developing what it describes as an “AI-driven” support ticketing system, today announced that it raised $90 million in Series D funding led by Goldman Sachs with participation from True Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Icon Ventures, Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital and others. CEO Muddu Sudhakar said the new cash will be put toward market expansion and supporting Aisera’s go-to-market strategy, in addition to investing in the company’s product development, R&D, sales and marketing initiatives.

Sudhakar says he built Aisera after perceiving the need for “predictive AI” solutions that could auto-resolve customer service, IT, sales and operations problems. Leveraging AI, the platform plugs into existing systems of record, including help desk portals, to respond to incoming inquiries and requests.

Sudhakar founded Aisera in 2017 alongside Christos Tryfonas, a longtime colleague. Sudhakar most recently led teams at ServiceNow and EMC, previously founding startups (Caspida, Cetas, Kazeon and Sanera Systems) that were acquired by VMware and Splunk. Tryfonas, a former AT&T Bell Labs researcher, worked with Sudhakar at several of his ventures before joining Aisera.

“We thought [the pandemic] would be a problem, but Aisera’s technology does very well in remote environments. Customers wanted AI and automation to drive user engagement and adoption,” Sudhakar told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Now in the current market downturn, we’re seeing the need for cost reduction on licenses and people. This is driving demand for Aisera as we’re able to help organizations reduce costs for IT and business services.”

The way Sudhakar explains it, Aisera’s platform learns to resolve issues through a combination of language-analyzing AI and robotic process automation, or RPA. RPA technology attempts to mimic the way people interact with software to accomplish basic, repeatable tasks at scale. It’s not a particularly novel idea — RPA vendors, including Automation Anywhere and UiPath, claim to be able to do this to some extent. But Sudhakar asserts that Aisera’s brand of RPA is custom-built for customer/employee service use cases.

“In some ways, Aisera competes with ServiceNow and Zendesk, but it’s also complementary to those solutions as we partner with them as well as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Salesforce, Atlassian, and Cisco,” Sudhakar said. “Aisera is unique and differentiated with ontology and taxonomy for each domain and vertical industry … [We also do] AI learning and training on customer data sets to capture specific intents, phrases, utterances required for natural language processing and natural language understanding.”

When a request comes in via email, voice, a ticket or a chatroom, Aisera attempts to understand it by analyzing it with an algorithm trained to understand language. The platform then cross-references sources like ServiceNow, Salesforce, Oracle, Confluence and SharePoint for customer data to personalize its replies to the request. After that step, Aisera creates a list of actions that need to be completed to fulfill the request, which it submits to a “workflow management” engine.

Aisera can return articles or snippets of articles from a company’s knowledge base that most …read more

https://techcrunch.com/2022/08/03/aisera-lands-90m-to-automate-customer-service-requests-with-ai/