Iron Pillar-backed customer experience automation startup Ushur picks Series C cheque
US and India-based Ushur, an AI-powered customer experience automation venture, said Tuesday it has secured $50 million in its Series C funding round led by Third Point Ventures with participation from existing investors Iron Pillar, 8VC, Aflac Ventures and Pentland Ventures.
Iron Pillar chipped in with $12 million of the total investment in Ushur, which is based in Santa Clara with product development in Bangalore. The VC firm, which is also behind other SaaS software companies like Uniphore, CoreStack and Jiffy.ai, originally invested in Ushur’s Series B funding round in February 2021.
Money from this round will go towards expanding Ushur’s experience automation portfolio, developing new innovations in AI and moving into new regions and industry verticals.
In the last 12 months, Ushur has tripled its headcount and doubled its customer base with strong Net Revenue Retention (NRR) of 164% as enterprises moved toward AI-driven automation solutions purpose-built for customer engagement applications. 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,” said 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,” he added.
Half of Ushur’s customers are Fortune 500 companies including globally recognized brand names such as Aflac, Cigna, CVS, Irish Life, United Healthcare and Unum Group.
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.”
Mohanjit Jolly, Partner, Iron Pillar, said: “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. It is exactly the sort of super-practical, high-impact technology that Iron Pillar looks for when we invest.”
Ushur’s enterprise-ready platform uses conversational AI, language intelligence and document understanding to deliver industry-specific, hyper-personalized customer experience solutions. Ushur will use the latest round of funding to enhance its platform with new technologies including Large Language Models (LLMs) and Generative AI.
It combines conversational automation and knowledge work automation in a no-code, cloud-native SaaS platform to digitally transform enterprise customer experience.
