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Augment today announced it has raised $5 million for an AI platform that assists customer service agents at large companies. The startup had operated in stealth for 10 months prior to launch.
The company joins competitors like Mattersight, DigitalGenius, LivePerson, and others in its efforts to train AI using conversations between customers and businesses in order to better guide customer service agents.
The money will be used to bolster the Augment AI platform, which is trained by an aggregated dataset made up of 100 million conversational interactions at large companies, including Dyson. Augment makes no attempt to replace human agents, only to make them more efficient.
“We can increase the number of interactions, the number of conversations an agent can have in a given window,” CEO Matt Swanson told VentureBeat in a phone interview. “Where most people are trying to deflect away conversations from humans, we’re just simply providing [assistance] throughout the conversation to make the agents better.”
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Call center agents are often slowed down in their work by the need to sift through documents, product information, or knowledge bases to find information for customers.
“They spend a lot of time searching for articles and scrolling down to find a piece of information they want. We can take that part out and say: ‘Here’s five potential responses, here’s the product information, here are the knowledge-based entries zoomed in at the right place you want’. These are the sort of things that the agents find valuable,” Swanson said.
The $5 million round was led by Silicon Valley Data Capital and Jazz Venture Partners.
Augment is based in San Francisco and has 15 employees.
