Artificial intelligence-powered communication automation provider IntelePeer Cloud Communications LLC announced Thursday it has raised $140 million in new equity and debt financing to support the company’s continued development of generative AI services to reinvent contact center customer service experiences.

The company’s equity funding was co-led by Savant Growth LLC and VantagePoint Capital Partners with support from Savant limited partners,  including Coller Capital, Hollyport Capital, Manulife Investment Management and Achmea. Vector Capital, through its newly formed direct credit strategy, Vector Velocity, led the debt financing.

Founded in 2003, IntelePeer automates customer service interactions voice, messaging and social media interactions. The company says its solution is “enterprise-grade and easy-to-deploy” to help businesses quickly implement AI-driven omnichannel communications securely with their already existing contact center setups.

Since its launch, the company said that it has automated more than 600 million customer interactions and lowered the cost more than 10 times. As an example, the company said one of its customers fully automates more than 60 million inbound interactions every year, achieving an over 70% self-serve rate for calls.

Another customer, nonemergency medical transport services company Secure Transportation cut hold times by 50% and diminished its ride wait times from 45 to 10 minutes by implementing IntelePeer’s SmartAgent service. This part of its platform uses generative AI to simplify customer questions, automate issues and communication with customers and helped streamline the ride dispatch process to reduce delays.

“IntelePeer grew its AI business by more than 100% year-over-year and is forecasting further acceleration, as a result of our commitment to reinventing the contact center through customer self-service automation,” said Chief Executive Frank Fawzi. “Our unique sales process harnesses generative AI to extract why consumers contact a business. The collected data is used to develop an intent map that identifies what AI use cases will deliver the highest return on investment with the best possible customer experience and can be used to create reports ready for executive and board presentations.”

Generative AI, the technology behind chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google LLC’s Gemini, can understand human speech and respond conversationally using company data. This means that customers can interact with a generative AI bot similar to how they would another person in a more natural experience than a phone menu or standardized chat interface that can only respond to menu items or keywords.

According to a Bain & Co. industry survey, 87% of companies have already deployed generative AI apps or are piloting the technology and the technology is already rapidly being used in a multitude of use cases. Its usefulness as an easy interface for humans to interact with computer systems in a natural way cannot be denied, especially with its ability to quickly answer customer questions and resolve issues.

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