Cogito, a startup well-known for its efforts in improving businesses’ call center activities through advanced analytics software, recently secured $37 million in a Series C round of financing.
Goldman Sachs Growth Equity led the round, which also included previous investors such as OpenView and Salesforce Ventures. As a result of the exercise, Mark Middle of Goldman Sachs became part of Cogito’s board of directors.
According to Cogito’s chief executive officer and co-founder Joshua Feast, the Series C financing round propelled Cogito’s total funding to $64 million since spinning out of the MIT Human Dynamic Lab 11 years back. He also stated that the recent exercise was a classic expansion financing round, which was all about deepening Cogito’s product development as well as growing its ability to service new clients.
Before emerging from the MIT lab in 2007, Cogito was trying to utilize the artificial intelligence technology that was available during that period not only in understanding sentiment but also in applying it in a business situation.
Although it took time for the company’s technology to catch up with its vision as well as identify the ideal use case, Joshua Feast said that Cogito is aiding customer service representatives in understanding the emotional context and sentiment of the individual on the line. In turn, Cogito’s technology gives the representatives the behavioral cues to help them proceed with the conversation.
Cogito is one of the members of a movement intended to assist companies in improving their customer service centers as well as other business operations through artificial intelligence technologies, data analytics, and other software tools.
Other entities in this movement include EthosIQ and AmplifAI whereby the former vends software that aids in assembling data from disparate IT systems and undertakes analytics to identify places where productivity can be bolstered. On the other hand, AmplifAI boasts software that utilizes machine learning algorithms to comprehend behaviors that are utilized by top-performing workers to come up with training programs for use by the other staff.
Currently, Cogito sells software to large software, premium companies that have thousands of people working in their contact centers. Joshua explained that the purpose of the startup’s solution is to offer a wonderful customer service experience, particularly in moments of truth.
Joshua Feast intends to utilize technology to transform customer service experience into more forms of human interaction.
In fact, he acknowledges the fact that as a business grows, various layers of the enterprise process make it difficult for customer service reps to project that humanity to customers. As such, Feast is convinced that even though technology has assisted in creating this issue, it can help solve it accordingly.
Although Feast did not disclose the specifics regarding Cogito’s planned product improvements, he said that they would entail making the software’s instant guidance for workers richer, more customized to the customer’s brand and more contextually aware.
Situated in downtown Boston, Cogito has 117 employees and hopes to use the recently secured funds to boost that number as its scales its vision. Joshua emphasized this point by saying the funding exercise was about scaling the company in a bid to meet its clients’ requirements.
Source TechCrunch
