NEW YORK, April 30 (Reuters) – Technology startup Netomi has raised $110 million in a Series C funding round led by Accenture Ventures, the startup’s chief executive told Reuters this week.
Founded roughly a decade ago, Netomi uses artificial intelligence to improve customer service for companies including United Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Paramount and DraftKings, said CEO Puneet Mehta on the sidelines of Reuters’ Momentum AI Summit in New York on Tuesday.
Recent advances in large language models that power the likes of ChatGPT have increased expectations for how adeptly bots can solve customer problems, without requiring intervention by a human representative.
California-based Netomi draws on such technology, using AI models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Alphabet’s Google, Mehta said.
That has allowed Netomi, for instance, to answer more nuanced questions in chats via United Airlines’ mobile app, such as, “Can I sit with my dog in the exit row,” he said.
Customers are “not going there for completely low-complexity items,” Mehta said. “They’re going there for at least medium complexity and that’s where we are focused.”
Reuters was unable to determine Netomi’s valuation after the funding round. The company has raised more than $160 million since its founding, said Justin Wexler, a general partner at backer WndrCo.
As part of the Series C round, media entrepreneur and WndrCo’s managing partner Jeffrey Katzenberg has joined the startup’s board of directors.
Accenture has also begun a partnership with Netomi. Wexler said hundreds of Accenture employees, trained to use the startup’s technology, will help customers roll out improved AI service agents.
Adobe Ventures also invested in the Series C. Adobe is working with Netomi to add AI to websites that run on its platform, said Wexler, on the sidelines of the Reuters summit.
Netomi, which employs about 170 people, will use the extra capital to invest in customer deployments, as well as in research and development, Mehta said.
The company hopes to deploy AI agents that preemptively solve customer problems and take proactive action, he said.
(Reporting by Jeffrey Dastin and Juby Babu; Editing by Thomas Derpinghaus)
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