Wellington Financial Provides US$8.5M in Growth Capital to Conversica to Advance AI-Based Business Conversations

What a difference a year makes.  18 months ago, equity providers were competing with folks in the innovation debt business.  That all started to change around Sept. 2015 as VCs began to crimp valuations.  Lo and behold, we are having our most voluminous year ever in terms of commitments and growth capital deployed.

Today’s news comes out of Foster City, California.  We recently closed a US$8.5 million growth financing for Conversica, the leader in artificial intelligence-powered business conversations. This financing is part of Conversica’s oversubscribed Series B funding round totaling US$34 million that hit TechCrunch this morning.

Conversica enables sales teams to optimize their time, focus on high value activity, and keep prospects engaged and happy through the funnel. Thanks to the power of conversational AI, Conversica is proving that not only is this software solution a need, it’s quickly becoming a must for many organizations.  Our non-amortizing growth capital is a powerful fuel for businesses with strong fundamentals, and in Conversica we found a leadership team, product, and market opportunity that’s very attractive and poised for future growth.

Conversica’s AI-powered sales-assistant engages leads in natural, two-way human conversations via email. This SaaS solution not only keeps sales representatives focused on selling instead of chasing down prospective clients, but it also helps businesses identify the best leads and the most effective lead sources in industries such as financial services, enterprise technology, education, automotive, and more. The technology integrates with the world’s leading customer relationship management and marketing automation systems, including those from Salesforce, Marketo, Oracle and HubSpot.

“The appetite for AI in business use cases is surging. At Conversica, we’ve built the leading solution for sales and marketing teams that drives real results. Adoption is only accelerating, which means that we have an opportunity to extend our early leadership position. We have built a true platform that leverages AI to automate business conversations, which is something all companies can get behind,” said Alex Terry, CEO of Conversica. “To do so requires capital that is smart and patient – and even better that we’re able to raise it while preserving ownership for our team. This is an exciting, fast-paced industry to be in and with today’s growth capital from Wellington Financial, we’re further positioned to win.”

With over 1,000 customers, Conversica has sent and received over 180 million emails and SMS messages through its Conversational AI platform to build one of the largest AI training data sets in sales and marketing communications. This year, Conversica was recognized as a Gartner Cool Vendor, joined the Inc. 5000 List of America’s Fastest Growing Private Companies and was awarded the 2016 CRM Excellence Award from CUSTOMER Magazine.

This latest financing gave us the chance to work with a host of new US-based VC partners: Kennet Partners, Providence Strategic Growth, Toba Capital, Recruit Strategic Partners.

MRM