Amplify.ai plans to raise at least USD 5m in a Series A next year
Amplify.ai plans to raise at least USD 5m in a Series A next year
TIM LEEMASTER
Amplify.ai CEO and co-founder Mahi de Silva
Amplify.ai, the Palo Alto, California-based marketing firm using conversational AI, plans to raise at least USD 5m in a Series A in the first half of next year, CEO and co-founder Mahi de Silva says.
“We’ll need money to go to new markets and service global demand in 2020,” de Silva said.
The company hit 250m unique users earlier this year and far beyond the 200m it had targeted by the end of 2019. It’s topline has grown 300% year over year, de Silva says, and the company would expect to hit break even next year.
Generally in marketing to a consumer a business spends about USD 7 per contact but de Silva says Amplify can do it for 10 cents.
The company plugs into Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, which is also owned by Facebook and Google’s Rich Business Messaging. About 50% of the company’s conversational volume is web-based such as company mobile apps and websites, de Silva said.
Amplify can operate in nine languages, including Spanish, German and French, and five Indian dialects. De Silva expects to begin a Chinese language service, outside the mainland, in December.
The company will often be used to respond to customer comments, or even just emojis, and is constantly doing AB testing off a technology stack it has developed internally, the CEO said.
“The conversational nature of what we do and the input/output is not well modeled by commercial platforms,” de Silva said.
That paid off with one client, Singapore Telecommunications, the government-owned telephone company. Within 30 days of deploying its technology Amplify’s algorithms were communicating in the local patois known as Singlish, a mix of Mandarin, Tamil, Malay and English loved by locals in the city state.
“Those kind of refinements can have a powerful impact and creates a personality for that assistant,” de Silva said. “People are more willing to engage if they feel it’s speaking with them.”
The company currently has around 40 employees based in Silicon Valley and Pune, a city of 4m people three hours’ drive southeast of Mumbai. It plans a third team of about a dozen staff in Europe next year, de Silva says. More employees are expected in its other locations as well bringing total headcount to at least 70.
New hires would come in sales and marketing as well as technology and operations.
Amplify, de Silva’s fourth startup, raised USD 3m in a seed round led by Costanoa Ventures and SV Angel in February 2017.
Part of the idea for Amplify came from his sale of one startup to Chinese cybersecurity firm Qihoo360. During the time he was in China he said he couldn’t help notice how strong a brand WeChat had become, and he thought there had to be some way to leverage social media with automated natural language processing in the business to consumer space.