The rumors are true: Interactions has raised $9.5 million in new funding.
We reached out to Interactions for confirmation, and they were generous enough to reply with a quote from Interactions CEO Mike Iacobucci:
“This new round of funding further supports our momentum in the market and represents an investment in Interactions’ expansion strategy following the recent acquisition of the AT&T Watson research and technology program.”
“We’re happy to have the continued support of our investors, who share Interactions’ vision of a highly accurate, multimodel interface for any application, device, or service.”
The new investment takes Interactions’ total capital to more than $100 million. Participants in this latest venture round were not disclosed. But previous investors in the company have included Cross Atlantic Capital Partners, North Hill Ventures, and Sigma Partners, all of which participated in funding rounds for the company in 2011 and 2013.
Above: Dan Fox, marketing manager for Interactions, demoed at FinovateSpring 2014 in San Jose.
Interactions’ technology is used by several Fortune 100 companies looking to leverage natural language understanding technology to make customer interactions both more efficient and more engaging. For banks and financial institutions, this includes providing a wide range of services—replacing lost or stolen cards, transferring money between balances, locating nearby ATMs—without the intervention of a live human agent. Interactions’ platform provides conversational solutions for customers in spoken language (including Spanish), as well as being able to respond by text, and email.
Recent headlines for Interactions include the company’s performance at the 19th MITX Awards this month, earning finalist honors in both the “Best Work Productivity Technology” and “Best Consumer Tech that Makes Life Easier” categories. The company’s virtual assistance technology was also recognized by TMC as a CUSTOMER Contact Center Technology Award winner for 2014.
The company’s acquisition of AT&T’s Watson speech-recognition and natural language understanding platform in December was a major coup that, according to Iacobucci, “will enable the development of highly intuitive interfaces for virtually any device or service and deliver on our vision for the ‘Interface of Things.'”
Interactions was founded in 2004 and is headquartered in Franklin, Massachusetts. A multiple Finovate alum, and two-time Best of Show winner, the company last demoed its technology at FinovateSpring 2014 in San Jose.