Level AI Launches With $15 Million in Funding to Make the Most of Every Customer Interaction

Former Amazon Alexa Product Lead Brings New, Real-Time Insights to Customer Service Communications

Today, Level AI publicly launched to modernize customer service. The company, founded by former Amazon Alexa product leader Ashish Nagar, has developed proprietary technology and conversational artificial intelligence to uniquely help organizations work with customers to solve any issues in real time and elevate the customer’s overall experience.

“With Level AI, we can give everyday people superpowers to do truly amazing, tailored work in a fraction of the time,” said Ashish Nagar, Level AI Founder and CEO.

The Level AI platform debuts amid a COVID-driven surge in customer-service call volumes and as enterprise contact centers shift to the cloud. With strong early demand for its cloud-based solution, Level AI is already working with more than 30 brands through its enterprise partners.

Level AI also announced the close of $13 million in Series A funding in conjunction with its launch, bringing its total funding to date to $15 million. The round was led by global investment firm Battery Ventures, with Battery general partner Neeraj Agrawal joining the Level AI board of directors. Seed investors ENIAC and Village Global as well as prominent angel investors also participated in the round, which will be used to increase the platform’s automation capabilities, invest in research and development to enhance the power of its conversational intelligence engine and to scale sales and marketing.

“We know that half a trillion words are exchanged between companies and customers in contact centers every day, and up to this point, these words have resulted in mostly dark data,” said Agrawal. “We believe that Level AI has a unique opportunity to enable companies to gauge real-time customer intent and surface real-time customer insights that can help improve quality of customer service teams, inform product roadmaps, improve compliance and more. This has long been considered a ‘holy grail’ for forward-thinking CX leaders.

“Ashish has a deep understanding for key product and technology problems to be solved in the space, and he and his outstanding team have designed a product that can have a deeply positive effect on the more than four million customer service workers and brands they represent,” Agrawal added.

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The Potential for Conversational AI

In addition to the sometimes debilitating surge of customer service traffic during the pandemic and the digital transformation of the enterprise with migration to the cloud, there have been multiple technology breakthroughs over the last two years that have enabled AI to understand human conversation more effectively. Still, true Conversational AI remains an unsolved problem. With Level AI, Mr. Nagar and his team are working to push these boundaries.

Before founding Level AI, Mr. Nagar was a product leader on Amazon’s Alexa team, working on an ambitious project called the Alexa Prize. The goal of the project is to enable humans to talk to Alexa for 20 minutes on any social topic. While working on this project Mr. Nagar realized the number of unsolved challenges in language understanding by computers and the untapped potential of true conversation intelligence within the enterprise. Google Home and Alexa are bringing this tech to households but for the millions of customer service enterprise workers who deal with voice and text conversations every day the latest technology was not available. This prompted Mr. Nagar to first build a voice assistant for frontline workers to enable screenless ambient computing and then launch a product for customer service teams.

“There’s been a big debate in technology about the role of AI in our society– would it end up replacing jobs or augmenting them? I believe humans are indispensable, but wanted to build something that could apply AI to multiply human productivity in really exciting ways,” said Mr. Nagar. “With Level AI, we can give everyday people superpowers to do truly amazing, tailored work in a fraction of the time. This is crucial in today’s environment, where brand identity is often inextricably tied to customer experience. Level AI helps organizations use the right insights to enhance every interaction– be it by phone, email, text or chat– so that customers’ needs are met right away and agents can assist even more customers.”

Built to Empower Teams of the Future

Level AI’s platform provides conversation intelligence, as opposed to just speech analytics or insights based solely on keywords or phrases, which can sometimes be taken out of context. Level AI instantly analyzes, automates and provides feedback to customer service agents so that they can deliver efficient, targeted assistance.

Unlike other companies in the space, Level AI performs its analysis in real time. This enables customer service agents to improve the experience at the moment of need. Level AI’s impressive capabilities have enabled the company to grow by 6x in terms of the number of customer service conversations being processed through its platform in the last six months.

​​“Level AI has been a pleasure to work with. Their conversation intelligence platform is unlike anything we have seen in space. The user-interface and tool are easy to use with practical features built in. The customer service side is even better. We truly see Level AI as a partner,” said Chris Lewis, Product Manager at Infocision, a leading customer service provider on behalf of Fortune 500 brands.