Voiceflow Inc., creator of a collaborative platform for building artificial intelligence-powered conversational chatbots, said today it has closed on a $15 million funding round led by the venture capital firm OpenView.

The round brings its total amount raised to $35 million and increases the company’s valuation by 50% since its last raise back in July 2021.

The startup offers a conversational AI platform that makes it possible for teams to collaboratively build complex and scalable chat agents that can automate customer support, internal tasks and other use cases. According to Voiceflow, its platform is focused on collaboration and usability, helping teams save a considerable amount of time in designing, testing and deploying AI agents.

Using Voiceflow, chatbot builders can integrate any natural language understanding model and technology stack. The platform provides a graphical user interface that makes it simple for users to design complex conversations, share prototypes and then launch their chatbots in production. It also acts as a “single source of truth” for chatbots, helping to eliminate concerns around inaccurate responses.

Voiceflow said the funding from today’s round will enable it to meet the rising demand for conversational AI platforms. These days, virtually every enterprise is looking to participate in an AI trend that was ignited earlier this year by OpenAI LP’s ChatGPT. Generative AI enables companies to build a new breed of more intelligent, humanlike chatbots, and Voiceflow can help them to quickly get started with the technology. With its GPT-powered AI builder, announced earlier this year, teams can leverage various large language models along with strict guardrails as the foundation of their chatbots.

The startup is targeting a rapidly growing market that is expected to expand from $9.6 billion this year to more than $47 billion by 2033. It does, however, face a lot of stiff competition from rivals such as Google LLC and Microsoft Corp., as well as startups such as ASAPP Inc. and Zammo.ai Inc.

Despite the competition, Voiceflow reckons it has carved out a strong presence in the AI chatbot space, with more than 130,000 global users, including the conversational AI teams at Amazon.com Inc., JP Morgan Chase & Co., The Home Depot Inc., Vodafone Group Plc and many more.

Voiceflow founder and Chief Executive Braden Ream said the company originally had a more limited scope, helping customers to build AI agents for the Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant platforms. “Our mission has evolved to being the collaborative platform for enterprise product teams to build AI agents for any channel or use case,” he said, adding that the OpenView team’s expertise “will be a tremendous asset as we look to introduce critical new innovations and meet growing customer demand.”

“OpenView has deep experience helping companies that are ready for rapid expansion and we are looking forward to helping Voiceflow maintain its impressive momentum as well as its position as the leading agent-building platform,” said OpenView’s partner Blake Bartlett.

Image: Voiceflow