Most contact center solutions deployed today are around 20 years old. And now it’s time for them to go the way of the dinosaur. That’s the word from Talkdesk, which this week announced $100 million in new funding.
The company plans to use the money on research and development related to actionable analytics, artificial intelligence, intelligent context-sensitive routing of voice and digital interactions, and machine learning. The contact center-as-a-service company also will leverage the investment to expand its AppConnect Innovation Ecosystem.
Viking Global Investors led the Series B funding round. Existing investor DFJ also participated. (Salesforce Ventures was also among Talkdesk’s early investors.)
Talkdesk CEO Tiago Paiva established Talkdesk after participating in a Twilio hackathon seven years ago. In an interview last year with Forbes, Paiva said “The call center space and the support space is all made of old technology. Everything has been around for many years: big switches, big routers, and it takes fortunes and years to implement. The idea of Talkdesk is to make it super simple for everyone to just go to a webpage, put in a username and password, and all of [a] sudden you have a call center.”
Of course, many contact center solution providers now offer their solutions through the as-a-service model. So Talkdesk’s Enterprise Contact Center Platform is just one of many CCaaS offerings in the marketplace.
But this company with humble beginnings has had a fair amount of success. In addition to the new function, the company has attracted several large enterprise customers, and collected various industry designations.
Large enterprise customers Avetta, Discovery Education, and The Scotts Company rely on Talkdesk technology. And in the last 12 months, Talkdesk notes, The Forrester Wave named it a Strong Performancer, Frost & Sullivan said it was the fastest growing provider in the cloud contact center software marketing, and The Gartner CCaaS Magic Quadrant listed it as a Visionary.