Transaction:
- Uniphore announced its Series E funding round of $400 million. This funding round brings Uniphore’s total funding to more than half a billion ($610 million).
- This round is led by NEA and raises the company’s valuation to $2.5 billion. March Capital and other existing Uniphore investors along with new entities also participated in this funding round.
Uniphore:
- Uniphore, founded in 2008, is a Conversational Service Automation (CSA) company which combines artificial intelligence, automation technology and machine learning. Uniphore is disrupting an outdated customer service model and bridging the gap between humans and machines by focusing on conversations.
New Enterprise Associates (NEA):
- NEA is a global venture capital firm focused on investing in technology and healthcare.
- It has four decades of investing experience and more than $20 billion in committed capital. It has built 600 businesses, resulting in more than 230 IPOs and 390 acquisitions, across sectors, stages and geographies.
Rationale:
- This new round of funding is Uniphore’s largest to date and will be used to extend Uniphore’s technology and market leadership with advancements in voice AI, computer vision and tonal emotion, as well as to expand its business operations globally, specifically in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific.
- Uniphore wants double down on technology that will define the future.
- Contact centers have become dramatically more complex. Despite their central importance to customer experience and brand value, many contact centers still lack a comprehensive, enterprise grade platform—this gap is impactful especially for large contact centers. Uniphore tries to fill this gap for enterprises.
- It offers a comprehensive and powerful conversational automation platform that combines conversational AI, workflow automation, and robotic process automation (RPA) into a single, business user-friendly, integrated solution to transform and democratize customer experiences. Uniphore’s deep experience with large enterprise contact centers allows its platform to tightly integrate with diverse legacy and modern technology tooling, across on-premise and cloud deployments.
- Umesh Sachdev, CEO and co-founder, Uniphore commented that its conversational automation engine has been delivering powerful and innovative solutions to help enterprises not just survive but thrive amidst all the demands placed on them by customers.
- Hilarie Koplow-McAdams, Venture Partner, NEA commented that as we continue to operate in an increasingly virtual work model, technologies like Uniphore’s are a necessity for organizations that want to unleash their competitive advantage and take their business to the next level.
- Uniphore has done two major acquisitions in past. Emotion Research Lab for added capabilities in emotion AI and Jacada for enhanced low-code/no-code capabilities.
Acknowledgements:
RBI Bulletin (www.bulletin.rbi.org.in), SEBI (www.sebi.gov.in), NSE (www.nseindia.com), BSE (www.bseindia.com)
Disclaimer:
This material has been prepared by the personnel in Vora Corporate Finance which is Investment Banking arm of Vora Management Consultancy Private Limited and looks after Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A), Private Equity (PE), Fund Raising, Debt syndication and Valuations and is based out of Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India. Any views or opinions expressed herein are solely that of individual authors and may differ from view of Vora Management Consultancy Private Limited. This material is proprietary to Vora Management Consultancy Private Limited and is for your personal use only. Any distribution, copy, reprints or forward to others is strictly prohibited.
This material captures the information based on information available in the public domain, public announcements and sources believed to be reliable. Analysis contained herein is based on publicly available information and appropriate assumptions. This material is intended merely to highlight market developments and is not intended to be comprehensive and does not constitute strategic, investment, legal or tax advice. In no event Vora Management Consultancy Private Limited be liable for any use by any party or for any decision made or action taken by any party in reliance upon, or for any inaccuracies or errors in, or omissions from, the information contained herein and such information may not be relied upon by you for evaluating any transaction.
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