Frontdesk AI (by Vidurama Inc), a Palo Alto-based Artificial Intelligence (AI) start-up that helps local businesses increase revenues through 24/7 personalised customer care, has secured seed funding of $1.1 million from Speciale Invest and a group of angel investors from the Bay Area.
Founded in 2017 by Srivatsan Laxman and Supriya Rao, Frontdesk AI re-imagines customer care for local businesses, offering an automated, full-service backup receptionist solution via messaging and voice. The start-up has launched its services in the beauty and wellness industry and is looking to expand into the dental market.
Srivatsan, co-founder and CEO at Frontdesk AI, said, “Our core technology breakthrough is a powerful new AI framework for learning deep contextual natural language models over constantly evolving (and growing) conversational spaces. We instantly answer questions on behalf of the business, recommend products or services, book appointments, take orders, gather feedback, route customer complaints, send reminders and more. We have handled over 60,000 calls so far, converting nearly a third of those into revenue generating transactions worth well over a million dollars in revenue for our customers.”
Vishesh Rajaram, managing partner Speciale Invest, said, “Reception desks at local businesses are often thinly-staffed and do multi-tasking. They tend to miss calls or put callers on-hold, leading to loss of customers and sales.” With Frontdesk AI, businesses will never miss customer calls again, he says. “By adapting to the unique workflows of every individual business and by fully integrating with the business management software and phone system, Frontdesk AI enables incredibly seamless and complete customer care experiences,” he added.
Speciale Invest is a $15 million seed stage fund managed by Vishesh Rajaram (managing partner) and Arjun Rao (partner). The Fund invests in seed stage start-ups, working on innovation led deep tech products in the areas of enterprise SaaS, healthtech, fintech, IoT, AR/VR and more. The company invests $100,000-500,000 as the first institutional capital into a start-up, and works closely with it in the early stage journey of 18-24 months.