Conversational AI startup Bland AI has emerged from stealth with a $16M Series A financing round led by Scale Venture Partners. The startup will invest the funds into team expansion and continue helping businesses streamline a wide range of phone-based tasks, from customer support to sales to internal operations.
Founded in 2023, Bland AI aims to reinvent the way businesses handle phone calls. The Bland AI Phone Calling Platform lets enterprises safely and securely build, test, and deploy their own AI phone calling agents that are able to react, answer or send phone calls, extract information for insights and pass call to humans if necessary.
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.
"Our mission is to fix the way businesses handle their phone communications. 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,” says Isaiah Granet, CEO and Co-Founder of Bland AI.
The AI agents also provide call transcripts, post-call analytics, and the ability to train the AI on a company's own phone calling data. The agents are also able to answer calls in multiple languages.
The Bland AI team plans to develop the platform and build an advanced analytics system to allow customers in healthcare, real estate, financial services, and small businesses to visualize granular phone call data that was previously difficult to access.
