If you haven't heard of an artificial intelligence company called Interactions, that's about to change. The 12-year-old firm based in Franklin, Mass., announced on Wednesday that it has raised a $56 million round to expand globally.
With 320 employees, Interactions provides virtual assistant software to help large enterprises offload work from human employees and help them save money by handling a wide range of complex customer service transactions. For example, Hyatt Hotels uses Interactions, which is powered by natural language processing and speech recognition technology, to power its phone reservation system, but it also be used through text message or online chat systems.
The company's new $56 million round was led by new investors Revolution Growth, NewSpring Capital and Comcast Ventures, bringing total funding to $167 million. But that's not the only headline news for Interactions this summer: The company also announced, in June, that it had hired Jason Bristow, who was Amazon's vice president of finance and treasurer from 2003 to 2014, as its CFO. And nearly two years ago it bought AT&T's Watson speech recognition platform.
Mike Iacobucci, CEO of Interactions, told BostInno the new financing will allow the company to grow faster and chase after more enterprise customers, domestically and internationally, building off its already fast-growing business.While Iacobucci declined to discuss revenue figures, he said the company saw 100 percent year-over-year growth in 2015, and that over 80 percent of revenue is now coming from recurring customers.
Iacobucci said the company has fewer than 75 customers and is now handling nearly 1 billion transactions every year. The company gets paid by the successful customer transaction.
Companies like Facebook and Amazon have recently raised the profile for the use of virtual assistants for customer service purposes, whether through chatbots on Facebook Messenger or Amazon's Echo. Iacobucci said Interactions can handle more sophisticated transactions through deep integrations within enterprise systems.
When asked about the company's long-term focus, Iacobucci said, "service the heck out of customers, continue to build the business to scale and go global and continue to build a substantial enterprise." He added: "We believe we’re on that path."
Interactions has offices in Indiana, Texas, New Jersey and New York. It recently opened a data center in Germany.
