Voicera’s Eva, a Fast-Growing Enterprise Virtual Assistant, Now Offers Full Transcription and Debrief Functionality to All Meetings
Voicera announced that it has closed its Series A round of financing, which, combined with its seed round, brings total funds raised to $20 million. This recent round will fund the continued rollout of the company’s innovative voice collaboration artificial intelligence (AI) system that transforms meetings into productive, accountable, efficient parts of an enterprise’s day. The Series A was led by e.ventures with participation from Battery Ventures, Cisco Investments, GGV Capital, Greycroft, GV (formerly Google Ventures), Microsoft Ventures, Salesforce Ventures and Workday Ventures.
Voicera created Eva as an in-meeting AI assistant. Eva joins meetings and conference calls and through a combination of voice recognition, natural language processing and machine learning provides the attendees with a meeting recording, full transcription and meeting highlights. These highlights and notes can be edited and shared through most of the leading collaboration systems like Slack and Salesforce, as well as via email.
“We believe that voice technology can transform how we work and a huge portion of our time at work is in meetings. Meetings are ephemeral, however, the results and impact of the meeting shouldn’t be. That is why we built Eva as an in-meeting assistant, we wanted to make meetings actionable.” In line with the funding, the company is also rolling out additions to the Voicera service including highly-requested features such as full-meeting transcriptions, complete email meeting recaps, and meeting debrief functionality,” explains Voicera CEO, Omar Tawakol.
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Voicera is experiencing more than 100 percent growth quarter-over-quarter and will use this round of funding to further develop the product and expand the features offered by Eva to meeting attendees. Voicera provides its features with no specialized software to download or hardware to install.
“Having backed founder Omar Tawakol previously, we are thrilled to partner with him for the second time at Voicera. Omar’s ability to create impressive teams and build complex technology at massive scale truly sets him apart. We feel strongly that Voicera’s AI-driven voice technology will do for meetings what Slack has done for email,” said Mathias Schilling, Managing Partner of e.ventures, a leading San Francisco-based venture capital firm that backs entrepreneurs that disrupt global markets.
“We believe voice collaboration will play a major role in the future of work. By investing in Voicera’s talented team and connecting them to Microsoft’s AI and productivity assets, we believe they will maximize the value of meetings,” said Leo de Luna, managing director at Microsoft Ventures.
“Voicera uses natural language processing and machine learning to help their customers make the most out of their meetings. It’s a great example of the amazing innovation and commitment to customer success that we’re seeing in the Salesforce ecosystem,” says Matt Garratt, Managing Partner, Salesforce Ventures.
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Voicera is one of the first voice-based AI solutions that extract its value from conversations between people rather than exchanges between a person and a device. Unlike device-based AI solutions, Voicera derives value from conversations and drives outputs into a knowledge worker’s current workflow without requiring any hardware.
To make this a reality, Voicera has designed a system that can handle conversations between multiple speakers, delivers higher accuracy rates than existing transcription services, and provides secure data-ownership controls that are required by the enterprise. The solution is easy-to-use and personalized for the individual customer. Voicera transforms how business users interact with company systems, and bridges the gap between complex workflows and simple voice interactions. Voicera’s integrations enable Eva to operate in any meeting environment such as BlueJeans, Zoom, UberConference and Skype. Eva is also capable of joining Cisco WebEx.
The most recent evolution of Voicera’s platform is focused on a lean-back experience for the user. Until recently users had to actively mark important moments through voice commands and on-screen taps. With the latest evolution, a user can get a full-transcript with automatically identified moments and an automatic email if they are using a supported conference provider. This update allows for the user to derive value after the meeting even when they aren’t actively engaging Eva during the meeting.
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