ASAPP Inc., a startup taking what it says is a research-driven approach to developing artificial intelligence products for the enterprise, has raised $120 million at a $1.6 billion valuation.

The startup secured the capital through a Series C round announced today that was led by Fidelity Management. ASAPP’s new $1.6 billion valuation is twice as high as a year ago. 

ASAPP offers an AI platform for improving the productivity of customer care teams and salespeople. It provides features that help representatives enhance their conversations with customers to close more deals. The platform also helps with related tasks, such as engaging potential clients while they browse a company’s website.

For customer care teams, ASAPP’s AI algorithms provide suggestions on how to answer user inquiries. The algorithms are also capable of deciding which agent should field an inquiry based on factors such as their past experience managing similar requests. Team leads have access to dashboards that track agent performance.

For sales teams, ASAPP provides similar AI-generated suggestions on how to improve productivity. The platform can identify best practices used by the most productive salespeople and distill them into recommendations for other members of the team. ASAPP also offers a feature that can detect opportune times to target website visitors with a sales message, for example when they’re browsing the product pricing page.

The platform’s features are based in part on AI research that the startup conducts in-house. ASAPP boasts a sizable research group led by scientists from MIT, Cornell University and other leading universities. One project detailed by the research group focuses on building chatbots that can interpret ambiguous questions more accurately by asking the user for additional context. The team’s other projects cover topics ranging from improving neural network efficiency to AI spatial reasoning.

Investing in foundational research can produce valuable product differentiation for companies with the resources to take on the expense. Research can be particularly important in markets as crowded as the customer experience software segment.

ASAPP rival Cresta Inc., which provides a competing contact center platform for boosting customer support agents’ productivity, is chaired by Stanford AI Lab director Sebastian Thrun. Cresta raised a $50 million funding round last month. And Amazon Web Services Inc., whose cloud platform also includes a contact center service with AI features, has entire teams dedicated to machine learning research.

“ASAPP is one of the few companies advancing research and development in artificial intelligence and its application for customer experience,” said ASAPP founder and Chief Executive Officer Gustavo Sapoznik. Traditional products, the executive added, have “rules-based technology and architectures limit companies to small improvements.”

According to a report from last year, ASAPP’s technology allows enterprises to increase the number of customer inquiries agents can field by 40% to 150%. Its clients include brands such as Dish Network Corp. and JetBlue.

The startup said that its latest $120 million round follows a year in which growth doubled, without disclosing absolute numbers. ASAPP has raised more than $400 million to date. Besides Fidelity, the round saw the participation of billionaire investor John Doerr, March Capital, Emergence Capital, Telstra Ventures and other institutional investors.

Photo: ASAPP