Your Source for Venture Capital and Private Equity Financings

TalkIQ Completes $14M Series A Financing

2017-09-19
SAN FRANCISCO, CA, TalkIQ, which helps businesses better understand and take action on voice conversations with customers, today announces it has closed a $14M Series A Round.
The round was led by Scale Venture Partners with participation from Aspect Ventures, Danhua Capital, Felicis Ventures LINE Corp and Salesforce Ventures. The Salesforce Ventures investment is from its new Salesforce AI Innovation Fund, announced today. Rory O'Driscoll, managing partner at Scale Venture Partners, has joined the board. The funds will go to scaling TalkIQ's growth, both within existing and new industries.

"Salesforce Ventures is committed to investing in technology that extends our intelligent Customer Success Platform and makes our customers even more successful," said John Somorjai, EVP of Corporate Development and Salesforce Ventures. "TalkIQ's best-in-class voice-to-text transcription engine and AI-driven analytics platform coupled with the #1 CRM platform empower our customers to extract critical business insights from sales and customer service interactions and take action on them within Salesforce."

Across industries, nearly 70 percent of customer interaction takes place on the phone - analytics and AI tools built solely for digital channels (email, chat, social) provide an incomplete customer picture. TalkIQ instantly unlocks customer voice data to drive efficiency in sales and support, capture and share customer feedback easily throughout the organization, track key trends over time, and predict c-sat and sales outcomes. The real-time ability to capture, analyze and provide recommendations for price inquiries, common objections, feature requests, and competitor mentions fundamentally changes the success of business conducted over the phone.

"TalkIQ applies the latest in speech recognition and natural language processing to a critical enterprise need," said Rory O'Driscoll of Scale Venture Partners. "The platform's ability to hand over precise analytics and insights from spoken conversations is game changing, but to do it in real-time while an agent or salesperson is still on the call? Huge."

Businesses can act immediately on insights and recommendations generated through TalkIQ while a call is in process. This helps drive efficiency and consistency across customer interactions, while also providing teams with confidence that an intelligent and instant recommendation engine is there to help guide them on every call when needed.

"TalkIQ has been terrific in helping us understand sales and customer success conversations and make improvements in a remarkably short time," said Prabhakar Gopalan, VP Growth and Revenue Operations at TrendKite, a TalkIQ customer. "Advances in AI are helping companies learn about customers in ways previously thought impossible. At TrendKite we help our customers measure, manage, and optimize the business impact of their PR and earned media with AI and the cutting-edge analytics of our platform. When we came across TalkIQ, we felt the synergy in our innovation paths instantly. We are excited about the possibilities with TalkIQ."

TalkIQ delivers the right insight at the right time to sales, marketing, account management, and support teams. From the moment they start, customers have access to intelligent and accurate call summaries of every conversation they have with customers - coupled with a robust coaching platform to drive accountability. TalkIQ's real-time capability not only provides insights within calls instantly, but recommends next steps (what to do, for example: if competitors are mentioned, a price inquiry is made, or objections are raised). Call-level insights are also aggregated at a summary level -- providing businesses a complete view of each customer's engagement with them.
"We know we've got something incredibly powerful that will benefit literally any business with clients or customers," said Dan O'Connell, CEO of TalkIQ. "This new funding - along with Scale's expertise tackling enterprise market growth and Salesforce's unmatched market leadership - will let us transform business intelligence with speech recognition and voice analytics."

About TalkIQ
TalkIQ helps businesses understand and take action on the most important insights from every voice conversation with their customers, throughout the customer journey. To do this, we've built proprietary enterprise speech recognition (ESR) and natural language processing (NLP) capabilities. TalkIQ enables client facing teams to, for the first time, take a scientific approach to understanding and acting on key moments with customers, including recognizing purchase intent, handling objections, responding to competitors, pricing, building rapport, closing, implementation, troubleshooting, renewal, and more. We've built TalkIQ to thrive in high volume sales and support environments, and it's ready to drive efficiency throughout teams, reduce ramp and training time, drive more deals, and quantify the voice of the customer.
http://www.talkiq.com

About Scale Venture Partners
Scale Venture Partners (@scalevp) invests in software companies that are transforming the future of work. Investments include: Box (BOX), Chef, Cloudhealth, DataStax, Demandbase, DocuSign, ExactTarget (ET), HubSpot (HUBS), JFrog, Lever, and WalkMe. ScaleVP partners with entrepreneurs to support accelerated growth from the first customer to market leadership. Founded in 2000, ScaleVP has over $1B under management and is located in Silicon Valley. For more information visit http://www.scalevp.com.

About Salesforce Ventures
Salesforce is the fastest growing top five enterprise software company and the #1 CRM provider globally. Salesforce Ventures -- the company's corporate investment group -- invests in the next generation of enterprise technology that extends the power of the Salesforce Intelligent Customer Success Platform, helping companies connect with their customers in entirely new ways. Portfolio companies receive funding as well as access to the world's largest cloud ecosystem and the guidance of Salesforce's innovators and executives. With Salesforce Ventures, portfolio companies can also leverage Salesforce's expertise in corporate philanthropy by joining Pledge 1% to make giving back part of their business model. Salesforce Ventures has invested in more than 200 enterprise cloud startups in 14 different countries since 2009. For more information, please visit http://www.salesforce.com/ventures.
(c) by Massinvestor, Inc. For contact info, please check out our about page.
>> Click here for in-depth research on 9,000+ startups and 5,000+ VC investors