Conversational artificial intelligence startup Kore.ai Inc. said today it has extended its Series C funding round to $73.5 million following a further investment from Nvidia Corp.

The company had originally raised $50 million in the round, which was announced in September and led by Vistara Growth and PNC. So the implication is that Kore.ai has managed to persuade Nvidia to part with a fairly big pile of cash.

Kore.ai is a promising startup that helps companies build AI assistants, primarily for contact centers. Notably, Kore.ai’s platform is low-code, which means users can create AI assistants using a visual dashboard without doing any coding. So an online retailer could use the platform to create a chatbot quickly and embed it into its website to deal with customers’ questions. Meanwhile, a bank might create a chatbot to field technical support questions, for example.

The technology can be applied to several use cases. For instance, Kore.ai has created an AI-powered search engine that customers can embed into their websites or their employee portals, so customers and workers can search for information.

Under the hood, Kore.ai’s platform relies on natural language processing technology that analyzes each request sent to its AI assistants in order to generate the correct response. Companies can customize the responses generated by the assistant based on factors such as the user’s previous requests.

Nvidia promises to be a key partner to Kore.ai going forward. Nvidia is one of the world’s leading innovators in speech AI, and its expertise in areas such as speech-to-text, NLP parsing and text-to-speech is likely to be hugely beneficial to the startup.

Kore.ai founder and Chief Executive Raj Koneru said his company will benefit from Nvidia’s expertise as much as its cash.

“Nvidia brings an industry-leading team and advanced AI technology,” he said. “We will work together to expand best-in-class support to enterprise customers so that they can leverage conversational AI modules to power their customer and internal workforce applications.”

Kore.ai said it’s planning to integrate its software-as-a-service platform with Nvidia’s AI software to try and maximize customization choices for its customers and deliver higher performance at a lower cost. More specifically, the company said it plans to leverage Nvidia’s Riva, a graphics processing unit-accelerated software development kit that’s geared towards building speech AI applications.

By using Riva running on Nvidia’s GPUs, Kore.ai said, its AI assistants will become more accurate in their understanding of customer queries and in their responses. Riva will also ensure lower latency in terms of response times.

John Ashley, industry general manager for financial services and technology at Nvidia, said his company and Kore.ai share the mutual goal of building extremely realistic, domain-specific, real-time voice assistants.

“This collaboration will give enterprise organizations the ability to tackle key technology challenges in speech recognition, NLP and TTS integration,” Ashley promised.

Image: Kore.ai