Balto Inc., a startup competing in the crowded contact center analytics market, today announced that it has closed a $10 million investment led by Sierra Ventures.

Sierra Ventures was joined in the Series A round by several other institutional backers, including Jump Capital, OCA Ventures and Cultivation Capital.

During the past few years, several startups have emerged with artificial intelligence tools designed to help companies find ways of improving contact center representatives’ productivity. These tools generally work by listening in on conversations, finding patterns associated with successful customer interactions and highlighting them to managers. Balto is looking to put a more real-time spin on the concept.

The startup’s platform also analyzes customer interactions for patterns, but instead of surfacing improvement suggestions only after the fact, it also gives contact center agents guidance while they’re on a call. Balto can, for instance, detect when a customer brings up a common product-related question and display the answer on the agent’s screen. Companies can customize the information that the platform shows according to their needs. 

Suggestions are displayed alongside a checklist that highlights questions and other items that an agent should bring up over the course of a call. When Balto detects that a task has been performed, it’s automatically removed from the list. 

“Unlike other conversation intelligence solutions available today that provide only post-call analytics, Balto uses AI to guide customer conversations on-the-fly, helping agents say the right thing, at the right time,” said Balto Chief Executive Officer Marc Bernstein.

The startup says its platform can reduce the duration of customer support calls by 90 seconds and, for sales interactions, provide an 35% increase in conversion rates. It plans to use the $10 million round announced today to triple the size of its go-to-market team, as well as invest in product development.

Balto’s funding round comes two months after Gong I.O. Ltd., which provides an AI-powered call analytics service for business-to-business sales teams, bagged $200 million at a $2.2 billion valuation. Earlier, competing startup Chorus.ai Ltd. raised $45 million for its own sales analytics platform.

Image: Balto