Blog

Uniphore: Full Stack Enterprise Conversational Automation

by Hilarie Koplow-McAdams and Mustafa NeemuchwalaFeb 16, 2022

Across our consumer and enterprise investments at NEA, we’ve seen a clear link between optimizing customer experience and business success. Despite many transformations in the way business is conducted, enterprises’ ability to handle customer concerns, questions, and requests in an optimized and consistent manner across modalities remains central to nailing customer satisfaction and often compliance requirements. Whether onshore or off, staffed with fulltime employees or gig workers, and with personnel working together in-person or now remotely—contact centers remain the central point from which enterprises manage their customer interactions across various channels at scale.

Contact centers have become dramatically more complex—evolving beyond the call centers of yesteryear to include legacy and modern modalities such as email, web chat, SMS, and social media in addition to voice. Despite their central importance to customer experience and brand value, many contact centers still lack a comprehensive, enterprise grade platform—this gap is impactful especially for large contact centers run by global BPOs, telecoms, insurance providers, financial institutions, and healthcare payors with complex and varied technology stacks combined with stringent compliance requirements.

We’ve seen how Uniphore fills this gap for enterprises, and that’s why we’re excited to lead Uniphore’s $400M Series E financing. Uniphore offers a comprehensive and powerful conversational automation platform that combines conversational AI, workflow automation, and robotic process automation (RPA) into a single, business user-friendly, integrated solution to transform and democratize customer experiences. Uniphore’s deep experience with large enterprise contact centers allows its platform to tightly integrate with diverse legacy and modern technology tooling, across on-premise and cloud deployments.

Starting with contact centers, where conversational automation represents a $350B market opportunity, Uniphore offers a platform built around four core services:

  • U-Self-Serve, designed to give businesses quick setup access to voice and chat-based conversational AI assistants

  • U-Assist, which serves up real-time call transcriptions and in-call coaching supercharged by RPA and integrations into the broader tech stack for actionability

  • U-Analyze, which uses natural language processing (NLP) to glean insights and generate analytics from customer conversations; allows high volume contact centers to truly analyze all conversations, including for compliance reporting, rather than simply sampling a small percentage

  • U-Trust, an automated voice authentication tool that helps verify an agent’s identity in the remote-working world

Demonstrating the value of its platform, Uniphore has closed multi-million dollar deals with customers and channel partners. Their current customers include brands such as Wipro, Priceline, DHL, WNS, Tech Mahindra, BYJU’s, NTT Data, Capgemini, and Sitel. Serving a diverse enterprise base, Uniphore’s customers include four of the top ten global BPOs, four of the top ten global telecoms, seven leading insurance providers, seven leading financial institutions, and four leading US healthcare payors.

Over time, Uniphore can offer value to other enterprise functions beyond the contact center, including sales, HR, and marketing, thus addressing a $1T market opportunity across the enterprise. Beyond applying NLP to chat and voice transcripts, Uniphore is also positioned to glean insights across all modalities of customer interactions, including computer vision-based analysis on facial expressions and extracting tonal emotions from voice, allowing the correlation of business outcomes to sentiment, engagement, and key moments across meetings.

We’re thrilled to join the Uniphore team on their journey to help enterprises around the world unlock one of their most valuable assets: customer conversations. Learn more about the team and vision here.

The information provided in this blog post is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended to be investment advice, or recommendation, or as an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy an interest in any fund or investment vehicle managed by NEA or any other NEA entity. New Enterprise Associates (NEA) is a registered investment adviser with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). However, nothing in this post should be interpreted to suggest that the SEC has endorsed or approved the contents of this post. NEA has no obligation to update, modify, or amend the contents of this post nor to notify readers in the event that any information, opinion, forecast or estimate changes or subsequently becomes inaccurate or outdated. In addition, certain information contained herein has been obtained from third-party sources and has not been independently verified by NEA. The companies featured in this post are for illustrative purposes only, have been selected in order to provide an example of the types of investments made by NEA that fit the theme of this post and are not representative of all NEA portfolio companies. The company founders or executives or any other individuals featured or quoted in this post are not compensated, directly or indirectly, by NEA but may be founders or executives of portfolio companies NEA has invested in through funds managed by NEA and its affiliates. Any statements made by founders, investors, portfolio companies, or others in the post or on other third-party websites referencing this post are their own, and are not intended to be an endorsement of the investment advisory services offered by NEA.
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About the Authors

Hilarie Koplow-McAdams

Hilarie joined NEA as a Venture Partner in 2017 and is focused on enterprise software and services. A software industry veteran, Hilarie spent three decades at growth-stage companies in operating and board roles. Most recently, Hilarie was President at New Relic. Prior to that, she was President at Salesforce, responsible for the company’s worldwide sales organization. She started her career at Oracle and Intuit. Hilarie has a master’s degree in public policy from the University of Chicago and a bachelor’s degree from Mills College.
Hilarie joined NEA as a Venture Partner in 2017 and is focused on enterprise software and services. A software industry veteran, Hilarie spent three decades at growth-stage companies in operating and board roles. Most recently, Hilarie was President at New Relic. Prior to that, she was President at Salesforce, responsible for the company’s worldwide sales organization. She started her career at Oracle and Intuit. Hilarie has a master’s degree in public policy from the University of Chicago and a bachelor’s degree from Mills College.

Mustafa Neemuchwala

Mustafa joined NEA’s Technology team in 2021. His investment interests across stages include AI, cybersecurity, developer, data, technically differentiated application software, and fintech. Before NEA, Mustafa advised on tech M&A deals at Qatalyst Partners across developer, cybersecurity, data, infra, fintech, deep tech, and consumer internet. After early years in Tokyo and Mumbai, Mustafa moved to the Dallas suburbs and is a proud Texan. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, studying fundamental and quantitative finance, liberal arts, computer science, and mathematics.
Mustafa joined NEA’s Technology team in 2021. His investment interests across stages include AI, cybersecurity, developer, data, technically differentiated application software, and fintech. Before NEA, Mustafa advised on tech M&A deals at Qatalyst Partners across developer, cybersecurity, data, infra, fintech, deep tech, and consumer internet. After early years in Tokyo and Mumbai, Mustafa moved to the Dallas suburbs and is a proud Texan. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, studying fundamental and quantitative finance, liberal arts, computer science, and mathematics.