Voiceflow raises $15M to build the ‘Figma’ of conversational AI

California-based Voiceflow, a startup looking to build the ‘Figma’ of conversational AI, today announced it has raised $15 million in a fresh round of funding led by OpenView Venture Capital. The company said it will use the capital to expand its product’s capabilities and enable more teams to build conversational AI agents targeting different use cases.

The development comes at a time when companies across sectors are racing to deploy conversational AI assistants and looking for fast solutions to accelerate their projects. Voiceflow delivers just that by building AI agents at twice the speed of traditional platforms.

The company currently works with approximately 130,000 users from 450 enterprises, including dozens of Fortune 500. With this round, its total capital raised has touched $35 million while the valuation has jumped 50% to $105 million.

Collaborative platform for conversational AI agents

Conversational AI is the need of the hour, but building these AI agents into business applications and workflows is quite a task in itself. Teams have to work closely in spreadsheets or Word documents to design the agent as per business needs, then use developer-centric platforms like Google’s Dialogflow or IBM Watson to build, test and launch it into production.

The thing is, doing all this can be very time-consuming — especially for large teams. Furthermore, not every team member involved in the process may have the skill set to work on a developer-centric platform. 

This is where Voiceflow comes in. The company offers a Figma-like collaborative platform, giving teams an all-in-one, low-code environment to design, build, test and deploy conversational agents of any scale or complexity. 

Once up and running, as many as 100 different users can work on Voiceflow in real-time to design complex conversation flows with advanced logic, quickly create shareable, high-fidelity prototypes to test and refine the user experience and eventually launch the agent to production. The offering also allows for integration with any existing natural language understanding (NLU) platform or technology stack, enabling teams to use their existing conversational AI tech stack without costly vendor replacements.

Delivering AI agents two times faster

According to the company, it can help teams deliver AI agents for any channel or use case two times faster than other solutions in the market. Plus, it can cut the time to review and test the agent by 75% and 50%, respectively.

“Customers mostly use Voiceflow today to build AI Agents for customer support automation, but we see (the potential of) many other use cases, from automated drive-thrus to in-app assistants and automotive agents,” Voiceflow founder and CEO Braden Ream told VentureBeat. 

“What differentiates Voiceflow is our focus on collaboration, a professional, powerful Agent design interface and a technology-agnostic approach,” he added.

Since its launch in 2018, Voiceflow has roped in 130,000 users from 450 global enterprises, including  Amazon, JP Morgan, The Home Depot, Vodafone, State Farm and BMW. Last year, the company’s enterprise revenue almost tripled, and today, the margins are more than 80%, said Ream.

Plan ahead

With this funding round, the company will look to build on ongoing momentum and launch new product innovations to make the experience of designing and deploying AI agents even better.

While Ream did not share much, he did note that part of this effort will be focused on adding a large language model (LLM)-powered AI Builder, which will enable teams to build and deploy agents for customer support and more.

According to Future Market Insights, the global conversational AI industry is predicted to expand from $9.6 billion in 2023 to $47.6 billion in 2033 with a CAGR of more than 17%.