Invoca Inc., a well-funded provider of contact center analytics software backed by Accel, has acquired another startup in the contact center analytics market called DialogTech Inc. for a reported $100 million.

Invoca announced the acquisition today without disclosing the deal size. The transaction’s $100 million price tag was reported by TechCrunch.

Invoca makes artificial intelligence software that enables companies to analyze contact center representatives’ conversations with shoppers to identify ways of improving the customer experience. If Invoca’s AI models show that a large number of shoppers express interest in a particular product, a company can adjust its marketing efforts to more heavily emphasize the item. When users reach out in mass about an issue related to the company’s e-commerce site, Invoca flags that there may be a technical problem.

DialogTech offers the same type of analytics features, but with a bigger focus on one specific use case: sales. The startup’s software provides a dashboard that enables executives to track what percentage of a contact center’s interactions with leads produces new deals. They can also see how sales change over time, to spot potential dips before they impact revenue, and compare sales performance with that of other contact centers to identify if there’s need for improvement.

DialogTech, similarly to Invoca, also provides features for identifying more fine-grained patterns in customer activity. The startup says its software helps companies spot the advertising campaigns that generate the most interest from customers so they can prioritize their marketing spending accordingly. 

Invoca expects the acquisition of DialogTech to increase its annual revenues to more than $100 million. The combined company’s customer base will include more than 2,000 organizations, including Home Depot Inc., Toyota Motor Corp. and other household brands.

Beyond growing its top line and product lineup, Invoca also sees the acquisition improving its ability to develop new features going forward. In a blog post, Chief Executive Officer Gregg Johnson explained that the deal is poised to double the size of the company’s engineering team. Johnson also pointed to DialogTech’s industry-specific know-how as a factor behind the acquisition.

“DialogTech has extensive experience in several key industries — including healthcare, automotive, and financial services — and has organized customer success teams by vertical,”  Johnson  detailed. “The incorporation of these teams and their accumulated knowledge into Invoca will result in more significant business impact for our customers.”

Invoca and DialogTech both developed their software mainly for companies that sell to consumers. Business-to-business companies are increasingly adopting AI in their contact centers as well. Gong I.O. Ltd, which provides AI-based analytics software for enterprise sales representatives, raised $200 million in funding last year at a $2.2 billion valuation. The startup disclosed at the time that revenue had jumped 250% over the preceding year thanks to strong demand.

Invoca has raised more than $110 million in funding while DialogTech is backed by about $75 million from investors.

In recent years, contact center analytics providers have benefited from a combination of strong investor interest around AI and big advances in the underlying natural-language processing technology they use to analyze customer interactions. The improvements in natural-language processing can be credited in significant measure to the emergence of Transformer models a few years ago. Transformer models vastly outperform previous neural networks because they infer the meaning of each word in a sentence through a process that involves analyzing all the surrounding words as well, which provides extra context that helps improve accuracy. 

Image: Invoca