(Image source: Ushur.)
Ushur, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based provider of intelligent automation for enterprise customer engagement, announced that it has raised a $50M Series C funding round led by Third Point Ventures (Menlo Park, Calif.) with participation from existing investors Iron Pillar, 8VC, Aflac Ventures and Pentland Ventures. Funds from this round will go toward expanding Ushur’s experience automation portfolio, developing new innovations in AI and moving into new regions and industry verticals, according to a statement from Ushur.
Simha Sadasiva, CEO, Ushur.
Ushur reports that, during the last 12 moths, the company has tripled its headcount, doubled its customer base and achieved a Net Revenue Retention (NRR) of 164 percent. The firm attributes these advances to businesses’ increased adoption of AI-driven automation solutions purpose-built for end-to-end customer engagement applications. Ushur asserts that this is an area where back-office automation technologies, such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA), continue to struggle to deliver business value.
“The previous generation of enterprise automation was designed for infrastructure processes,” comments Simha Sadasiva, CEO and cofounder, Ushur. “We built Ushur’s AI platform with a different goal in mind: to provide excellent customer experiences at scale and to deliver meaningful interactions that put the customer’s needs at the center. Enterprises have a massive appetite for modernizing the customer experience to maintain their market position. When combined with automation, this unlocks tremendous financial value. Ushur’s CXA cloud delivers on both of these promises. Our success is a direct result of the value created for the enterprise with a focus on the customer experience, which continues to shape our technology, our strategy and our culture.”
Distinguished Customer List
Robert Schwartz, Managing Partner, Third Point Ventures.
Ushur reports that half of its customers are Fortune 500 companies, including globally recognized brand names such as Aflac, Cigna, CVS, Irish Life, United Healthcare and Unum Group. The Ushur statement asserts that these enterprises have improved customer engagement rates as much as 85 percent, reduced email triage times from five days down to five minutes and slashed customer issue resolution times by as much as 90 percent.
“Ushur is achieving impressive growth and deployment with production technology perfectly suited to automate enterprise-class customer engagements,” comments Rob Schwartz, Managing Partner, Third Point Ventures. “As enterprises in verticals such as insurance, healthcare and financial services run into the limits of the previous generation of business process automation, we see Ushur’s user experience-focused, AI-driven platform deliver massive value to their customers. Our continued investment in Ushur further demonstrates our conviction that Ushur is shaping a new category, one that will fundamentally transform how enterprises engage and serve their customers at scale. I just can’t wait to see what comes next for this truly innovative company.”
Ushur describes its platform as enterprise-ready, with artificial intelligence at the core. The firm says it uses conversational AI, language intelligence and document understanding to deliver industry-specific, hyper-personalized customer experience solutions. Ushur says it will use the latest round of funding to enhance its platform with transformative new technologies including Large Language Models (LLMs) and Generative AI.
Super-Practical, High-Impact Technology
Mohanjit Jolly, Partner, Iron Pillar.
“We have been long-time believers in Ushur’s unique approach of using AI-powered automation to elevate the enterprise customer experience while delivering operational efficiencies that are the need of the hour for every business leader,” says Mohanjit Jolly, Partner, Iron Pillar. “It is exactly the sort of super-practical, high-impact technology that Iron Pillar looks for when we invest. We are excited to partner with Ushur on their extraordinary growth journey.”
Ushur’s CXA platform is designed to facilitate what the firm calls Micro-Engagements—short exchanges of information that give customers the freedom to dip in and out of interactions at their convenience. “With digital self-service at the core, Ushur’s no-code platform enables non-technical users, especially in highly regulated industries such as healthcare, insurance and financial services, to visually create sophisticated AI-powered workflows for automating tasks such as claims processing and claimant engagement, urgent member interactions in adverse weather events, customer support, Medicaid redetermination, pharmacy experiences and appointment scheduling,” the Ushur statement elaborates. Ushur reports that it supports more than 60 languages and comes with industry-leading conversational AI, sentiment analysis and intelligent document processing capabilities.
In addition to rapidly growing its customer base, Ushur says it has expanded its ecosystem through strategic partnerships with Benefitfocus, Sutherland, HCL, WNS, Sagility and Guidewire, the launch of a rapid integration capability with Salesforce AppExchange and the addition of Ushur’s Healthcare solution to the Amazon Web Services Marketplace.
Ushur Extends Series B, Adds Aflac, Iron Pillar as Strategic Partners