Conversational artificial intelligence (AI) platform Yellow Messenger has raised $20 Mn in a Series B funding round from the Menlo Park, California headquartered Lightspeed Venture Partners. The investment has been made by Lightspeed India Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners. 

The platform acts as a single source of intelligence for customers and employees across multiple communication channels such as Microsoft Teams, Slack, WhatsApp, telephony, and can be integrated with the existing System of Record and System of Engagement at the enterprise level. It helps automate and orchestrate workflows for customer and employee engagement with minimal human intervention.

The AI platform claims to be able to carry out these engagements on voice and text in over 120 languages. The platform in partnership with Facebook Messenger was also appointed by the National Health Authority of India to provide chatbots for citizen engagement for COVID-19 response at the state government level.

Founded in 2014 by Rashid Khan, Jaya Kishore Reddy and Raghu Ravinutala, the startup has seen a huge demand for its conversational AI platform since the very beginning, achieving 5X growth in bookings, year over year, since 2017 as per CEO Raghu Ravinutala. 

“With rapid advancements in voice tech, AI and multilingual capabilities, our product has consistently offered a truly scalable solution by delivering meaningful and measurable results to enterprises across the globe. This investment will help us scale our operations and speed track the R&D endeavors to service the surge in global demand for automation,” Raghu added.

In addition, the company will invest further in its product innovation roadmap, including deepening multi-lingual voice bot capabilities, expanding enterprise integrations, and launching a developer marketplace for virtual assistants.

Previously, Bitonic Technology Labs, the Bengaluru based company that owns and operates the Yellow Messenger platform, had raised its Series A round of $4 Mn in June 2019 from Lightspeed and a bevy of angel investors including Snapdeal Co-founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, and redBus Co-founder Phanindra Sama, among others.

The funding points out to the rise of conversational AI for enterprises as its conversational AI platform is used by over 100 enterprises for customer and employee engagement. This demand is expected to go up as consumer expectations of real-time conversations with their brands further increase. This has also led to rising investor interest in enterprise-focused conversation AI companies. Interestingly, Yellow Messenger as also one of the startup partners in People Matters TechHR 2018 and a demo booth partner in 2019.