Open-source conversational artificial intelligence startup Rasa Technologies Inc. has raised $26 million in new funding to invest in continuing growth, AI research and developer and community education.

The Series B round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and included the Cultural Leadership Fund, Accel, 468 Capital, Basis Set Ventures and Mango Capital.

Founded in 2016, Rasa offers an infrastructure layer for conversation AI including the tools required to build contextual assistants. While offering the core platform on an open-source basis for free along with Rasa X, a free toolset, the company’s enterprise side offers a commercial version that includes enterprise-grade support for developing contextual assistants at scale.

Chatbot startups are a dime a dozen in 2020, but Rasa claims it’s different from many because it doesn’t simply provide “black box” technology and drag-and-drop interfaces. Instead, Rasa’s offering uses natural language processing research, machine learning and a flexible infrastructure that it claims can deliver better conversational AI apps.

“A simplistic chatbot might be easy but a resilient, fully contextual assistant that works is not,” Alex Weidauer, co-founder and chief executive officer of Rasa, said in a statement. “Rasa is committed to supporting the developer in creating robust, mission-critical bot applications through better research, investment in open source software, superior developer tools and education and flexible on-premises or cloud deployment.”

The company claims sixfold growth of its software over the last 14 months, to 3 million downloads, and says it has tripled its community membership. Rasa says its offering is now used by six of the top 10 banks in the world, five of the 10 biggest global telecommunications firms and five of the 10 largest insurance companies. Notable customers include Deutsche Telekom AG, Adobe Systems Inc., Bayerische Motoren Werke AG, Airbus SE, ENGIE SA, HCA Healthcare Inc. and Orange SA.

Including the new funding, Rasa has raised $40.1 million to date.

Image: Rasa