Barcelona-born Inbenta raises €5.6 million ($6.5 million) to expand its AI-powered customer service platform internationally in Europe, the United States, and Japan.
NTT DOCOMO Ventures participated in the funding as part of an extension of a Series B round worth €10.2 million, which was signed two years ago with Scale Capital, LevelEquity and Amasia — companies that have participated in the current operation, according to Empresa Exterior.
This move will allow Inbenta to accelerate the growth of its business, entering new international markets, mainly in Europe, the United States and Japan, and boost its R&D to continue evolving and perfecting its product.
Founded in Barcelona and with fiscal headquarters in Silicon Valley, Inbenta has doubled in size in the last two years. The patented software of the technology based on the “Meaning-Text Theory” is deployed in more than 250 large companies, with a presence on six continents, and belongs to a great diversity of sectors such as banking, insurance, telecommunications, retail, travel, technology and transportation.
The Meaning-Text Theory is a theoretical linguistic framework created by Aleksandr Žolkovskij and Igor Mel’čuk, for the construction of natural language models. The theory provides an extensive and elaborate basis for linguistic description and, because of its formal nature, it is perfectly adapted to computer applications.
The team at Ibenta has implemented software based on the way the Meaning-Text Theory conceives natural language from lexicon to semantics, which has led its linguistic team to create detailed and specific descriptions of the lexical units in a number of different languages.
Inbenta, with its integrated offering of six enterprise-grade AI and NLP-driven products — the Inbenta Chatbot, Semantic Search, E-Commerce Search, Knowledge Management, Case Management, and Live Chat, automates over 300 million real-time customer interactions per year across the web, mobile, social, and SMS channels, and natively supports 30 languages servicing a number of multinationals and diverse support organizations.
On May 31, 2018, it was announced that NTT DOCOMO Ventures, the venture capital arm of NTT DOCOMO, had made a strategic investment in Inbenta Technologies, but the amount was not disclosed in the press release.
Spanish media reported on Wednesday that the amount is $6.5 million (€5.6 million).
Jordi Torras
In a statement last May, Inbenta Founder and CEO Jordi Torras remarked, “We’re excited to have NTT DOCOMO Ventures as a new strategic investor,” adding, “our newest partner brings not only capital, but valuable experience in Inbenta’s key markets including Japan.”
According to Expansion, the relationship between Inbenta and NTT DOCOMO began in 2017, when the company led by Torras opened a delegation in Tokyo (Japan) and signed an exclusive distribution agreement with the mobile telephony corporation. NTT DOCOMO is a subsidiary of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, Japan’s former public telecommunications company privatized in 1985.
Inbenta closed its first round in 2014, once its internationalization process was consolidated, which began four years earlier. The company won the support of InverSur, a Chilean venture capital fund that contributed €1.7 million. This firm subsequently changed the name to Scale Capital and remains one of the reference shareholders of the Catalan company.
Inbenta empowers the world’s largest enterprise and e-commerce companies to improve customer satisfaction rates and reduce support costs with best-in-class functionality including:
- Rapid Time-to-Market: Getting started takes days, not months, giving companies high-performance AI out-of-the-box.
- Understands Meaning: Patented NLP technology that utilizes Meaning-text Theory, enabling highly conversational experiences that work with your existing knowledge & content.
- Multilingual Support: Native support in over 25 languages, allowing global coverage for the most demanding enterprises.
- Deploys Across Channels in Minutes: With open APIs & SDKs, companies can deploy across web, mobile, social, SMS, and more in minutes.
