INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Conversational AI and the use of chatbots have been through multiple cycles of hype and disillusionment in the tech world
You know the story: first you get a launch from the likes of Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Google or any number of other companies,
But time brings improvements and more focused expectations, and today a startup that has been harnessing all those learnings is announcing
funding to take to the next level its own approach to conversational AI.Rasa, which has built an open-source platform for third parties to
design and manage their own conversational (text or voice) AI chatbots, is today announcing that it has raised $13 million in a Series A
round of funding led by Accel, with participation from Basis Set Ventures, Greg Brockman (co-founder CTO OpenAI), Daniel Dines (founder
CEO UiPath) and Mitchell Hashimoto (co-founder CTO Hashicorp).Rasa was founded in Berlin, but with this round, it will be moving its
headquarters to San Francisco, with a plan to hire more people there in sales, marketing and business development; and to continue its tech
development with its roadmap including plans to expand the platform to cover images, too.The company was founded 2.5 years ago, by
insurmountable roadblock, the shortcomings of chatbots became the problem that Rasa set out to fix.Alan Nichols, the co-founder who is now
Specifically, that means building a model that can be used by any company to tap its own resources to train their bots, in particular with
unstructured information, which has been one of the trickier problems to solve in conversational AI.At a time when many have raised concerns
approach is a refreshing one.Typically, when an organization wants to build an AI chatbot either to interact with customers or to run
something in the back end of their business, their developers most commonly opt for third-party cloud APIs that have restrictions on how
challenged to have the human or other resources to execute this.Rasa underscores an emerging trend for a strong third contender
The company has built a stack of tools that it has open-sourced, meaning that anyone can (and thousands of developers do) use it for free,
with a paid enterprise version that includes extra tools, including customer support, testing and training tools, and production container
data; and the company can ultimately host their bots wherever they choose, which have been some of the unique selling points for those using
next battleground for the enterprise, and while this is a very difficult space to win, especially for unstructured information like text and
Rasa is applying commercial open source software solutions for AI environments similarly to what open source leaders such as Cloudera,
