{"id":18304,"date":"2020-04-25T23:06:08","date_gmt":"2020-04-25T23:06:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rbsitsoftwaresolution.com\/blog\/medallia-acquires-voice-to-text-specialist-voci-technologies-for-59m.html"},"modified":"2020-04-25T23:06:08","modified_gmt":"2020-04-25T23:06:08","slug":"medallia-acquires-voice-to-text-specialist-voci-technologies-for-59m","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rbsitsoftwaresolution.in\/blog\/medallia-acquires-voice-to-text-specialist-voci-technologies-for-59m.html","title":{"rendered":"Medallia acquires voice-to-text specialist Voci Technologies for $59M"},"content":{"rendered":"

MA has largely slowed down in the current market, but there remain pockets of activity when the timing and price are right. Today, Medallia<\/a> \u2014 a customer experience platform that scans online reviews, social media, and other sources to provide better insights into what a company is doing right and wrong and what needs to get addressed \u2014 announced<\/a> that it would acquire\u00a0Voci Technologies<\/a>, a speech-to-text startup, for $59 million in cash.<\/p>\n

Medallia <\/a> plans to integrate the startup\u2019s AI technology so that voice-based interactions \u2014 for example from calls into call centers \u2014 can be part of the data crunched by its analytics platform. Despite the rise of social media, messaging channels, and (currently) a shift for people to do a lot more online, voice still accounts for the majority of customer interactions for a business, so this is an important area for Medallia to tackle.<\/p>\n

\u201cVoci transcribes 100% of live and recorded calls into text that can be analyzed quickly to determine customer satisfaction, adding a powerful set of signals to the Medallia Experience Cloud,\u201d said Leslie Stretch, president and CEO of Medallia, in a statement. \u201cAt the same time, Voci enables call analysis moments after each interaction has completed, optimizing every aspect of call center operations securely. Especially important as virtual and remote contact center operations take shape.\u201d<\/p>\n

While there are a lot of speech-to-text offerings in the market today, the key with Voci is that it is able to discern a number of other details in the call, including emotion, gender, sentiment, and voice biometric identity. It\u2019s also able to filter out personal identifiable information to ensure more privacy around using the data for further analytics.<\/p>\n

Voci started life as a spinout from Carnegie Mellon University (its three founders were all PhDs from the school), and it had raised a total of about $18 million<\/a> from investors that included Grotech Ventures, Harbert Growth Parnters, and the university itself. It was last valued at $28 million in March 2018 (during a Series B raise), meaning that today\u2019s acquisition was slightly more than double that value.<\/p>\n

The company seems to have been on an upswing with its business. Voci has to date processed some 2 billion minutes of speech, and in January, the company\u00a0published<\/a> some momentum numbers that said bookings had grown some 63% in the last quarter, boosted by contact center customers.<\/p>\n

In addition to contact centers, the company catered to companies in finance, healthcare, insurance and others areas of business process outsourcing, although it does not disclose names. As with all companies and organizations that have products that cater to offering services remotely, Voci has seen stronger demand for its business in recent weeks, at a time when many have curtailed physical contact due to COVID-19-related movement restrictions.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur whole company is delighted to be joining forces with experience management leader Medallia. We are thrilled that Voci\u2019s powerful speech to text capabilities will become part of Medallia Experience Cloud,\u201d said Mike Coney, CEO of Voci, in a statement. \u201cThe consolidation of all contact center signals with video, survey and other critical feedback is a game changer for the industry.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not clear whether Voci had been trying to raise money in the last few months, or if this was a proactive approach from Medallia. But more generally, MA has found itself in a particularly key position in the world of tech: startups are finding it more challenging<\/a>\u00a0right now to raise money, and one big question has been whether that will lead to more hail-mary-style MA plays, as one route for promising businesses and technologies to avoid shutting down altogether.<\/p>\n

For its part, Medallia, which went public in July 2019<\/a> after raising money from the likes of Sequoia<\/a>, has seen its stock hit<\/a> like the rest of the market in recent weeks. Its current market cap is at around $2.8 billion, just $400 million more than its last private valuation<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The deal is expected to close in May 2020, Medallia said.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Article source: http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/techcrunchIt\/~3\/elRaoZlYTeM\/<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

MA has largely slowed down in the current market, but there remain pockets of activity when the timing and price are right. Today, Medallia \u2014 a customer experience platform that <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[19],"tags":[25],"class_list":["post-18304","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-enterprise-software","tag-enterprise"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t