Hyro Raises $10.5 Million in Series A Funding to Replace Chatbots and IVR Systems with Adaptive Communications

By AIT News Desk On May 26, 2021

Hyro, a leader in conversational artificial-intelligence (AI) solutions, announced that it has closed a $10.5 million Series A funding round led by Spero Ventures, with participation from the leading cloud communications platform Twilio Inc. and Mindset Ventures, bringing the company’s total funding raised to date to $15 million. Existing investors Hanaco Ventures, Spider Capital and Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator are all participating as well.

Hyro will use the capital raise to hire top talent across all departments as it continues to build out its Adaptive Communications Platform to enhance its customers’ web, mobile and call center solutions, while also expanding its presence across key industries where it is already experiencing strong traction. The investment from and partnership with Twilio reflects the flexibility and scale for which Hyro’s platform can impact organizations across any vertical. The company also plans to increase the size of its team by 50% in 2021.

Already widely adopted across healthcare, real estate and government—including clients like Mercy Health, Novant Health, Carroll, and Contra Costa County, CA—Hyro is well-positioned for significantly increased market share and client acquisition as enterprises seek to automate key processes and messaging across their most valuable platforms, services and channels using natural language. Over the past year, Hyro has grown its customer base by over 500%, offering adaptive solutions as COVID-19 exposed the vulnerabilities of siloed data sources and inflexible processes in the context of enterprise communications. Hyro’s ability to quickly launch and expand context-elastic experiences has positioned them as the go-to solution for organizations looking to meet customers and employees in any conversational setting without expending heavy business resources.

“Hyro is pushing the reset button on chatbots and IVR systems. We’re reinventing the way companies and their customers interact by offering adaptive communications, as opposed to intent-based solutions that often break. Chatbots have become a mainstay within customer engagement, but because many are intent-based, they constantly need to be retrained and have limited ability to scale, which forces the enterprise to slow down while also alienating its customers,” said Israel Krush, Co-Founder and CEO of Hyro. “This funding round enables us to further establish ourselves as the leading Adaptive Communications Platform in high-growth sectors looking to automate valuable interactions at scale. I’m also excited to add Twilio, the leading cloud communications platform, as an investor in our fresh approach to conversational AI, and I’m looking forward to a partnership rooted in better, more adaptive solutions for enterprises and their customers.”

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Hyro’s Adaptive Communications Platform ensures easy bi-directional communication, through text, touch and voice capabilities, between its clients and their end-users. As opposed to rigid intent-based chatbots and IVRs which need thousands of examples (conversations and utterances) to generate a simple response, Hyro’s platform is both linguistics and knowledge-based, meaning that their conversational AI learns human language first and then continuously layers use cases on top of that understanding engine. Providing those conversational interfaces with such a strong lingual foundation allows for large enterprises to keep pace with ever-changing content, datasets and customer demands. As data is added or adjusted across websites, databases, CSVs, APIs and other sources, Hyro automatically updates their knowledge graph so that the information provided to end-users remains accurate.

Hyro is firmly established throughout the healthcare sector as a result of the innovative product offerings it rapidly developed to help patients seeking COVID-19 information. At the onset of the pandemic, as healthcare providers were overwhelmed with questions surrounding COVID-19, Hyro quickly developed a free AI-powered virtual assistant to eliminate misinformation while saving millions of dollars for healthcare organizations in COVID-19 outreach and process management. Additionally, as vaccines became available, Hyro built and deployed automated call center solutions to handle mass vaccination scheduling, in some cases offloading over 85% of patient inquiries. In total, Hyro has helped over four million patients in the U.S. with COVID-19 concerns. The crisis demonstrated the platform’s adaptability and speed to implementation, as well as its industry-leading ability to engage patients, reduce churn rate and increase profitability.

“We are thrilled to back the Hyro team whose technology will fundamentally change customers’ expectations of the organizations they interact with,” said Spero Ventures’ Sara Eshelman. “Why is it that I still spend 20 minutes on hold to find and schedule an appointment? Hyro’s plug-and-play infrastructure enables companies to automate those tasks in a matter of hours, unlike traditional intent-based systems that require extensive training and time-to-launch. As early users through Weill Cornell Medicine in NYC, Hyro initially felt like magic to us. That’s the effect of adaptive communications—and we’re betting that soon, people everywhere will expect the same.”