Cresta, which uses AI to mentor customer service agents in real time, raises $50M

Cresta, an AI-powered platform that offers real-time support to help customer service agents respond to inquiries on calls or in chats, has raised $50 million in a series B round of funding.

The company’s latest investment, which was led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from Greylock Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Allen & Company, and Porsche Ventures, comes after a year of growth that saw its revenues quadruple. It’s difficult to read too much into any first-year revenue growth metrics, but it’s clear that companies are hankering for technology that helps them optimize their customer-facing operations.

Contact centers have proven fertile ground for AI, with a slew of companies emerging to offer their own take on how automation can improve companies’ interactions with their customers. Just today, Uniphore announced a fresh $140 million investment to analyze emotion and engagement in both voice and video-based calls, while Talkdesk launched a new “human-in-the-loop” AI trainer for contact centers.

Cresta shares common ground with many of these companies, though it’s placing a specific focus on learning from what the best-performing agents do and passing this knowledge to colleagues while nudging them with suggested responses.

Above: Cresta: Behavior coaching

The San Francisco-based company officially launched last year with $21 million in funding, and it has amassed an impressive roster of clients so far, including Intuit, Adobe, and Dropbox. Cresta recently introduced Cresta for Voice to target phone-based sales and contact center teams, and it launched an integration with Amazon Web Services’ Amazon Connect cloud contact service platform last year.