Conversational AI Platform Bland AI Raises $16M To Change Outdated Enterprise Call Practices With Automated Phone Agents

Startup building hyper-realistic AI agents emerges from stealth with funding round led by Scale Venture Partners to automate calls and visualize call data

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today Bland AI, the platform automating phone calls for the enterprise using hyper-realistic AI agents, emerged from stealth with a $16M Series A financing round led by Scale Venture Partners. The developers of the AI Phone Calling Platform will 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 $22M; other investors include: Y Combinator and angel investors Max Levchin the founder of Paypal, Piotr Dąbkowski the CTO of Eleven Labs CTO, Jeff Lawson the founder of Twilio, and others.

Every day enterprises are paying employees to spend countless hours at their desks dialing numbers, answering calls, and talking to leads, customers, and other businesses, only to miss a call, drop a call, or worse - transfer the call into a purgatory of elevator music. Bland AI was founded to reinvent the way businesses use the most relied upon, yet outdated telecommunication system there is: phone calls.

"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.”

The Bland AI Phone Calling Platform allows enterprises to securely/safely build, test, and deploy their own AI phone calling agents. Customers start by choosing a voice and creating a conversational pathway, 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. Some notable aspects of the platform include:

• Integrations into any other system, knowledge retrieval from documents, and the ability to transfer to a human when necessary.
• Transcripts of calls, post call analytics, and the ability to train the AI on your own phone calling data.
• Voice cloning, multi-language support, an AI testing system, and infinite calling scalability.

Enterprises are already generating and saving revenue with Bland AI. Customers like Better.com and Sears are creating custom AI agents, configuring and personalizing how it should react, deploying it to answer or send phone calls, extracting information to see detailed analytics, and passing any relevant data back into the company’s existing systems.

"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 Bland AI team will continue developing the platform and building an advanced analytics system to allow customers in healthcare, real estate, logistics, financial services, alternative data, and small business to visualize granular phone call data that was previously impossible to obtain. With this data, businesses can continuously optimize performance to create their perfect AI agent.

Bland AI is committed to the highest standards of trust and safety. The platform actively restricts the calls supported, ensuring that the AI phone call technology continues to benefit consumers, businesses, and society as a whole.

To test it out, start building for free, or to see open roles go to https://www.bland.ai/. For enterprises interested in a more advanced version of Bland, visit https://app.bland.ai/enterprise.

About Bland AI

Bland AI is a conversational AI platform that automates phone calls for businesses using hyper-realistic AI agents. Founded in 2023, Bland AI's mission is to revolutionize how enterprises handle phone communications, enabling more efficient, personalized interactions at scale. Investors include Scale Venture Partners, Upfront Ventures, Y Combinator and angels. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, with a global team of AI experts and industry veterans. For more information go to https://www.bland.ai/.

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