AI agent automation solutions provider Bland AI announced that it has officially emerged from stealth with a $16 million Series A financing round, led by Scale Venture Partners. The company, which offers enterprises its AI Phone Calling Platform, plans to use the funds to hire and continue helping businesses streamline a wide range of phone-based tasks, from customer support to sales to internal operations. With this financing, Bland AI has raised a total of $22 million. Its other investors include Y Combinator and angel investors Max Levchin, the founder of Paypal; Piotr Dabkowski, CTO of Eleven Labs; Jeff Lawson, the founder of Twilio, and others.
Bland AI was founded with a goal of “reinventing the way businesses use the most relied upon, yet outdated telecommunication system there is: phone calls,” according to the company.
The Bland AI Phone Calling Platform was designed to allow enterprises to securely build, test and deploy their own AI phone calling agents. Customers start by choosing a voice and creating a conversational pathway, a.k.a. a tree of prompts that dictates how the AI might respond to any given response from a customer. Once a pathway is built out, the AI agent can traverse the pathway to figure out the right response, allowing it to always stay on track and help the customer, regardless of what the AI encounters.
"Our mission is to fix the way businesses handle their phone communications," says Isaiah Granet, CEO and co-founder of Bland AI. "The problem is that humans simply can't work 24/7, handle millions of phone calls simultaneously, or be trained to a company's exact liking down to its voice and behavior. But AI can, and at a fraction of the cost. We want Bland to work alongside enterprises' employees to improve efficiency across the board.”
The platform also includes integrations into any other system, knowledge retrieval from documents and the ability to transfer to a human when necessary. It also provides transcripts of calls, post call analytics and the ability for users to train the AI on their own phone calling data. Finally, it includes voice cloning, multi-language support and AI testing system, and calling scalability.
"Bland AI is reimagining how enterprises communicate,” said Andy Vitus, Partner at Scale Venture Partners. “The Bland AI agents understand human emotion, speak any language, and represent a brand like a top employee. The platform is saving businesses time and money, and enabling a whole new era of intelligent, personalized interactions at scale - and we’re excited to partner with the team as they build.”
Edited by
Alex Passett
