WALTHAM, Mass.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–May 27, 2003–
Investment by Sevin Rosen Funds and Solstice Capital will Fund Company Growth and Accelerate Time to Market for Speech Self Service Application Software
Unveil Technologies, Inc., a provider of enterprise speech self service applications for contact centers, announced today that it has closed a series A financing round totaling $4.5 million dollars.
The private equity placement will fund the Company’s product development and marketing efforts through its next round of growth, including the deployment of its solution at multiple enterprise-scale customer sites. Unveil’s Conversation Manager(TM) is an unbreakable speech self service application for enterprise contact centers that lets customers ask what they want and always get the right answer. Sevin Rosen Funds led the round, with Solstice Capital participating. In conjunction with the financing, David Shrigley, a General Partner at Sevin Rosen Funds and Fred Bamber, a General Partner with Solstice Capital, will join Unveil’s board of directors.
“The fact that Unveil was able to secure this investment in such a difficult funding environment is a sign of the enormous opportunity for Unveil in the enterprise customer self service market,” said Ivan Mimica, CEO of Unveil Technologies. “Contact centers are clearly looking for a voice self service solution that breaks the classic trade-off in customer service between cost reduction and customer satisfaction. With the financial support of leading VC firms behind us, Unveil will offer that solution to the market.”
“Sevin Rosen’s mandate is to invest in companies with new technologies that are disruptive to traditional paradigms,” said David Shrigley, General Partner of Sevin Rosen Funds. “Unveil has combined two powerful advantages – a proprietary core technology that gives it a significant competitive advantage over legacy voice response vendors, and an innovative agent-centric product approach that resonates with speech recognition skeptics.”
“Unveil’s management team has a history creating sophisticated speech and natural language solutions that significantly reduce operating costs without forcing changes in the behavior of end users,” said Fred Bamber, General Partner of Solstice Capital. “The contact center market is ripe for a product offering that, unlike conventional speech interactive voice response systems, guarantees that every customer interaction will be resolved correctly – no matter how conversational or complex the inquiry.”
A New Approach to Voice Self Service
The demand for customer self-service solutions has become acute in today’s tough business climate. Because an estimated 65% of customer service expense is fixed labor, each customer interaction that can be automated or more efficiently handled results in a measurable reduction in operating costs. But conventional speech-enabled interactive voice response systems (IVR) have several significant drawbacks. They force users into highly directed, scripted interactions, they are completely static, and they are extremely difficult and expensive to design and implement.
Unveil’s Conversation Manager is an unbreakable enterprise speech self service application for contact centers that lets customers ask what they want and always get the right answer. Unveil’s Conversation Manager works with live agents and learns directly from real customer interactions to continually reduce costs while guaranteeing high customer satisfaction. Unlike conventional speech IVR systems, the Conversation Manager handles all of the transactions, improves dynamically, is cost effective to design and maintain, and is based on open standards.
The Unveil Conversation Manager utilizes patented technology called the Unveil Meaning Recognition Engine (MRE) that enables users to ask for information in whatever way is most comfortable and natural to them. Unveil’s MRE technology is ideally suited for voice self service applications because it can accurately recognize meaning in real-world conversational interactions, despite the common errors generated by even the most advanced speech recognition software.
About Sevin Rosen Funds
Sevin Rosen Funds is a top-tier venture capital firm with a track record of funding successful companies since 1981. The partnership has consistently made early stage investments in pioneering technologies and companies with the potential to create new markets. The most recent fund, Sevin Rosen Fund VIII is capitalized at $600 million. Compaq, Lotus, Cypress, Citrix, CIENA and Capstone Turbine are some of the firm’s successful lPOs. Sevin Rosen Funds has offices in Dallas, Palo Alto, Austin, and San Diego. For more information go to www.srfunds.com.
About Solstice Capital
Solstice Capital is a seed- and early-stage venture capital company that invests in alternative energy, education, the environment, life sciences and information technology. Solstice was formed in 1995 and currently has $80 million under management. General partners include Harry George, Henry Newman, and Fred Bamber. The Company maintains offices in Tucson, AZ and Boston, MA. For more information, go to www.solcap.com.
About Unveil Technologies
Unveil Technologies provides unbreakable enterprise self service applications that let callers ask what they want and always get the right answer over multiple interaction channels. The Company’s innovative approach to contact center automation has won it continuing praise and recognition by the industry’s analysts and publications, including Call Center Magazine’s 2002 Product of the Year Award, Communication Solution’s Best of Show Award, and awards for innovation at Giga Information Group’s IT Forum 2002 and Emerging Technology Scene 2001 conferences. The Company was founded in September 2000 by proven entrepreneurs with a history of success in bringing to market enterprise automation systems based on advanced speech and language software. For more information on Unveil and its products, please visit www.unveil.com.
