New York-based startup Hyro has announced its latest funding round, which it said would help it to expand its platform into new verticals.
The company’s Adaptive Communications Platform allows for communication between hyro customers and end users via text and voice. It contrasts its offering to rigid chatbots and IVRs which require thousands of examples to generate even the simplest responses, instead relying on a linguistics and knowledge-based conversational AI. That foundation allows its customers to build up use cases on top of a base layer of language, with the platform evolving and automatically updating based on the data fed into it.
Since its foundation in 2018, the company has raised almost $15mn. Its latest Series A round, announced yesterday, saw the company raise $10.5mn from lead investors Spero Ventures alongside cloud communications platform Twilio, Spider Capital, Mindset Ventures, Hanaco Venture Capital and Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator.
Hyro said it would use the funding to hire new talent and expand its presence into key industries such as healthcare, real estate and government.
“Hyro is pushing the reset button on chatbots and IVR systems. We’re reinventing the way companies and their customers interact by offering adaptive communications, as opposed to intent-based solutions that often break. Chatbots have become a mainstay within customer engagement, but because many are intent-based, they constantly need to be retrained and have limited ability to scale, which forces the enterprise to slow down while also alienating its customers,” said Israel Krush, Co-Founder and CEO of Hyro.
“This funding round enables us to further establish ourselves as the leading Adaptive Communications Platform in high-growth sectors looking to automate valuable interactions at scale. I’m also excited to add Twilio, the leading cloud communications platform, as an investor in our fresh approach to conversational AI, and I’m looking forward to a partnership rooted in better, more adaptive solutions for enterprises and their customers.”
Adaptive Communications in Response to COVID-19
The company, whose customers include the likes of Novant Health and Carroll, has grown its customer base by 500% in the last year – with Hyro attributing the growth to the utility of its adaptive solutions in the face of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed, the company developed a free AI-powered virtual assistant for healthcare organisations to eliminate misinformation as the pandemic began last year.
“We are thrilled to back the Hyro team whose technology will fundamentally change customers’ expectations of the organizations they interact with,” said Spero Ventures’ Sara Eshelman. “Why is it that I still spend 20 minutes on hold to find and schedule an appointment? Hyro’s plug-and-play infrastructure enables companies to automate those tasks in a matter of hours, unlike traditional intent-based systems that require extensive training and time-to-launch. As early users through Weill Cornell Medicine in NYC, Hyro initially felt like magic to us. That’s the effect of adaptive communications—and we’re betting that soon, people everywhere will expect the same.”
