Spitch Releases Conversational AI Platform, Aisera Nets $90M in Series D Funding, More CX News

Aisera, an AI-driven service experience platform for automated employee experiences (EX) and customer experiences (CX), announced that it secured $90 million in Series D funding led by the Growth Equity business within Goldman Sachs Asset Management (Goldman Sachs) and Thoma Bravo.

Investors True Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Icon Ventures, World Innovation Lab (WIL), Zoom Ventures, Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital, Maynard Webb (Webb Investment Network), Ram Shriram (Sherpalo Ventures) and Silicon Valley Bank also participated.

Aisera provides an Artificial Intelligence Service Experience (AISX) platform. It plans to innovate on that platform and accelerate market expansion across industry verticals.

“AI has become necessary to support employees in today’s highly inflationary, work-from-anywhere environment and customers who expect to get the help they need expeditiously,” Muddu Sudhakar, founder and CEO of Aisera, said in a statement. “Advances in conversational AI deliver better experiences than traditional support solutions like legacy ITSM and Customer Support providers.

“With the injection of growth capital from Goldman Sachs and Thoma Bravo, Aisera will be the invisible hand of innovation that enables all users — across all lines of business and industries — to get the support experiences they’ve come to expect without human latency, error or disruption. With our AISX capabilities, enterprises can resolve issues, drive activation and tap critical intelligence sources in minutes versus days.”

Aisera’s AI Service Experience platform incorporates AI Service Desk, AI Customer Service and Ticket AI with Agent-Assist for B2B and B2C organizations. It resolves tasks, actions and workflows for IT, HR, customer service, sales and operations. Integrations include enterprise applications ServiceNow, Salesforce, Oracle, Zendesk, Workday, Adobe, Atlassian and BMC.

In other customer experience and digital marketing software news…

Spitch Releases Conversational AI Platform

Spitch.ai, which provides conversational AI solutions, has announced updates to the company’s omnichannel conversational AI platform, the Spitch.ai Knowledge Base (KB). It integrates with the company’s virtual assistant technology. Spitch.ai’s Speech Analytics (SA) now includes advanced reporting and business intelligence tools with new user interfaces backed by a low code/no code approach.

Other updates include multi-party conversation support for Speech Analytics for use during conference calls and calls transferred between agents in contact centers. The updates include sentiment scoring, diarization, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and summarization features.

“Deploying and managing the Spitch Knowledge Base has become even easier thanks to our low code/no code product philosophy as well as drag and drop user UI construction,” Piergiorgio Vittori, president and CEO of Spitch US, said in a statement. “Minimal involvement, if any, of customer IT resources is required to get up and running. Our tiered structure of the new Knowledge Base product — including Tier 1 functionalities free of charge supplied with all the new Virtual Assistants implementations — makes smart business sense for customers with a range of needs.” 

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OpenText Unveils Cloud Editions 22.3

OpenText, which provides customer experience and information management solutions, has announced Cloud Editions 22.3 (CE 22.3).

From the customer experience side, OpenText announced the following updates:

• OpenText Qfiniti Explore, which offers multi-channel data for insight into customer interactions. Customers can get data from customer chat sessions and access an open transcription service.
• OpenText Media Management, which facilitates automating the publishing of content to platforms such as Vidyard, YouTube or a CDN. Also new to the solution is the support for Google Video AI for object, places and activity analysis, and an integration with social media management platform Hootsuite. 

Omeda Announces Strategic Growth Investment from Sverica Capital

Omeda, an audience relationship management platform, announced a strategic investment from Sverica Capital Management, a private equity investment firm. 

“We are extremely proud of the company we have built and the transformation we have engineered to make Omeda the full SaaS solution it is today,” Aaron Oberman, CEO of Omeda, said in a statement. “Finding a great partner in Sverica will allow us to accelerate investments in our products, growth and client experience. The entire Omeda team is excited about this next phase in our company’s journey.”

Oberman will continue to lead the company with COO James Capo, while Jordan Richards, managing partner at Sverica, and Ryan Harstad, partner at Sverica, will join Omeda’s Board as part of the transaction.

Omeda offers a full suite SaaS marketing platform. It offers expertise in first-party data, subscription management, customer data platform (CDP) and marketing and email automation platform.

“First-party audience data is the lifeblood of media companies and associations, and hundreds of these groups have trusted Omeda to manage, amplify and monetize this data,” Ryan Harstad, partner at Sverica, said in a statement.

Klaviyo and Shopify Establish Strategic Partnership

Klaviyo has announced a strategic partnership with Shopify. Shopify made an investment in Klaviyo as part of the partnership. 

Klaviyo customers and the agencies and system integrators using non-Shopify platforms including Magento, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Prestashop and custom carts will continue to benefit from and be supported by new and updated Klaviyo features and functionality released nearly daily, according to Klaviyo officials.

mParticle Acquires AI Startup Vidora

mParticle, which provides customer data infrastructure, has announced that it has acquired Vidora, an AI personalization platform for customer data. With the acquisition, teams can deploy models across mParticle’s partner ecosystem of 300+ API integrations to improve decisioning, segmentation and personalization, according to company officials.

The combined offering includes: 

• Enhanced utilization of marketing and analytics tools
• Improved conversion and ROI at scale
• Predictive audience segmentation

This is mParticle’s second acquisition in the last seven months.

“Teams need to do more with less and we believe that begins by doing better with data,” mParticle CEO Michael Katz said in a statement. “By incorporating AI into the data layer, teams can improve the value they get out of their customer data, their data pipelines and their customer engagement toolset. The end result is unmatched performance without sacrificing scale.”

Lytics Launches Private Instance and Private Cloud on Google Cloud

Lytics, a customer data platform, has announced the launch of Lytics Private Instance and Lytics Private Cloud on Google Cloud. Features on the Lytics platform includes data pipeline and profile management, audience exploration, creation and activation. It will now be deployed inside a customer’s Google Cloud environment.

The Lytics Private Instance available on Google Cloud offers a fully-managed instance of the Lytics CDP. Lytics Private Cloud offers a full deployment of the Lytics CDP in a business’ own instance of Google Cloud, as a single tenant.

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“This innovation will enable businesses around the world to leverage some of the best-in-class technology from Lytics within a secure cloud environment,” Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, president of Lytics, said in a statement. “This is particularly important for industries like finance and healthcare that are highly regulated and recognize the mission critical nature of first-party data driving the future of their customer experience.” 

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monday.com Introduces monday sales CRM

monday.com, a work operating system (Work OS), has introduced monday sales CRM, a customer relationship management (CRM) system built to unify all customer processes under one platform. monday sales CRM is the first of five new product solutions built by monday.com to support sales, marketing, software development, project management and more.

monday sales CRM integrates with apps and services including Salesforce, Hubspot, Slack, Aircall, Mailchimp, PandaDoc and Docusign.

Some key features of monday sales CRM include:

• Automate tasks
• Fully customizable
• Fully sync Gmail/Outlook to send and receive emails, or automatically log sent emails
• Notifications when a lead opens or replies to an email
• Management of team quotas
• Management of post-sale activities in one place
• Plan sales hiring process

“As organizations’ digitization continues to evolve rapidly, the need for a unified cross-department customer view becomes more pressing. We’re building a CRM that is fast, flexible and breaks down departmental silos to connect teams across entire organizations, which increases efficiency and results,” Ron Kimhi, monday sales CRM product lead at monday.com, said in a statement. “Our new approach to CRM is unified but also very easy to use, ensuring a seamless journey from prospect to customer and beyond, optimizing daily teamwork, team satisfaction and success.”

Storyblok Launches New CMS Experience

Storyblok, which provides content management system software, has announced the launch of its all-new CMS. Storyblok V2 includes a new user interface, a new design experience, collaboration tools and an enhanced digital asset manager.

Storyblok’s headless CMS architecture includes a visual editing experience, Google Docs-style collaboration suite, composable components, presets and publishing workflows. V2 also introduces support for a US data center, providing Storyblok users with additional hosting options across the US and Europe.

“We’ve been fortunate to have a front-row view inside the content operations of some of the world’s leading businesses,” Alexander Feiglstorfer, co-founder and CTO of Storyblok, said in a statement. “We built V2 because companies need flexibility and smarter workflows to adapt and scale to support the ever-increasing complexity of omnichannel digital experiences.

“After testing it in beta with our 82k+ users over the past year and listening to their feedback, we’re finally ready to show even more companies what content management should be like in the 21st century.”

Sitecore Appoints New CHRO Officer

Sitecore, a digital experience software provider, has announced the appointment of Kim Sullivan as chief human resources officer.

Sullivan has over 25 years of experience leading human resource efforts. She joins Sitecore most recently serving as chief people officer at Concentrix.

Prior to Concentrix, she held senior roles at Kaiser Permanente Washington, The University of Texas System, Walgreens and Marathon Oil Company. She has a master’s degree in human resources development from the University of Houston and a bachelor’s degree in speech communications and organizational psychology from Texas Southern University.

CONTENTgine Updates Marketing Platform

CONTENTgine, which provides content-based marketing solutions, has launched new artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning capabilities for its Content Indication Platform.

“Customers rely on us for smarter and unique content-based insights that lead to better sales results,” Tim Ribich, vice president of product management for CONTENTgine, said in a statement. “This next iteration of CIP continues to raise the bar to a higher standard of purchasing intent, helping organizations achieve a greater return on investment for their demand generation and account-based marketing strategies to win meetings and close new business.”

Marketers with the updated software can focus on account activity and purchasing intent while capturing data. They can view a new signal location map to geographically pinpoint where a specific account’s content engagement activity is most prominent. In addition, a new user interface helps filter account and content insights to provide additional views of data sets organized by industry, company size, revenue, HQ location and intent score.