Voice AI Specialists NLX Raises $5 Million In Seed Funding

NLX has secured $5 million in seed funding to transform businesses’ customer support into AI-powered, automated, personalised customer self-service experiences.  The company is on the precipice of doubling its customers, revenue, and people, and the recent raise will help NLX scale, optimise product offerings, hire, and drive sales.

Aquila Capital Partners is the round’s top investor, participating investors include Flying Fish Partners, Sage Venture Partners, and JetBlue Technology Ventures.

Founded in 2018, New York-based NLX quickly identified an opportunity to improve customer service. Hold times and staffing challenges continuously plagued the customer support industry, resulting in diminished customer satisfaction, brand loyalty, and ultimately, a hit to the bottom line. The pandemic compounded these existing challenges, creating a clear need: Businesses needed a better way to efficiently and effectively address customer inquiries whenever and however without hiring more staff.

Andrei Papancea, CEO and Co-founder at NLX explains: “We are grateful to have such an incredible support system of investors like Aquila Capital Partners, Flying Fish Partners, Sage Venture Partners, and JetBlue Technology Ventures to help NLXⓇ grow quickly and sustainably. The capital raise renewed our unwavering confidence in our product, people, and business, and we’re excited for what’s next.”

“Customer service is an area ripe for improvement within the commercial aviation industry and beyond. NLX’s platform is destined to be an industry game-changer for its ability to walk customers through simple tasks, from rescheduling a flight right down to changing a password. This automation allows for customer service agents to focus on more complex traveller needs,” comments Ryan Chou, Investment Principal at JetBlue Technology Ventures.

When encountering this problem, most businesses decide to either build a solution themselves, outsource support to bot companies, or stay the course with current support. Making no changes improves nothing, and building custom solutions internally or investing in a bot can be time-consuming and expensive. Additionally, none of the bot companies appeared to fulfil the full business need, addressing customer concerns in the modality (over the phone or online) in which they enter.

Coming from a strong background in conversational AI, NLX co-founders Andrei and Vlad Papancea and Peter Szerzo created a suite of AI-powered products that allow businesses to offer white-glove service to all their customers, no matter if they reach out on the phone, online, or using voice assistant technology like Alexa.

“Andrei is part of the next generation of innovative and promising entrepreneurs. He and his team created a highly-innovative product offering that will change the way companies and their customers think about customer service. The potential of NLX is so exciting, and I’m thrilled to help the company scale to shape the future,” says Mark E. Watson III, Founder and Chairman at Aquila Capital Partners

Voice Compass, NLX’s flagship product, enables businesses to design conversations that forge customer trust and brand loyalty through exceptional customer self-service experiences.

From password reset, to device setup, to changing flights, or something else, Voice Compass augments a brand’s existing self-service flows by verbally guiding calling customers through an onscreen journey to complete their mission. Dialog Studio allows organisations to centrally design and manage all aspects of their AI-powered Chat and Voice conversations – including conversation logic, training, authentication, analytics, and deployment across any channel, with little to no programming.

Voice Insights is NLX’s powerful analytics tool. It empowers contact centre supervisors to monitor contact centre metrics, provides a fully searchable repository of calls, and transcribes and analyses call recordings to help organisations achieve operational efficiency.

“We were extremely impressed with NLX’s world-class team and industry-leading technology. The decision to invest was easy. With their platform, SMBs and enterprises alike can automate complex customer support tasks with state-of-the-art AI and help increase customer delight while driving down costs. We are proud to have NLX in our portfolio and look forward to helping them grow,” explains Frank Chang, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Flying Fish Partners.

Unlike most other companies in the conversational AI space, NLX does not have any hidden fees or service charges and implemented a simple pay-as-you-go business model that allows companies to scale in a cost-effective and customer-friendly manner.

Companies using NLX’s tools are able to automate 60-70% of all incoming inquires, reducing strain on support staff so they can focus on solving more challenging questions that go beyond AI’s current capability. NLX’s 24/7 product suite solution also enabled businesses to answer customer inquiries at any time of the day, and avoid putting customers on hold.

“NLX’s superior technology and strong, strategic vision for transforming customer support was the deciding factor that led us to invest. We can already see how conversational AI technology is proving transformational in key sectors, and the young company is perfectly placed to seize the market and yield impressive results,” comments Frederick J. Warren, Founder and Manager at Sage Venture Partners. The demand for NLX products generated the need to hire more staff to continue growing the business, optimising the product suite, and driving sales.