PayPal Ventures reports that is co-leading Rasa’s $30 million Series C funding round.
Rasa, the generative conversational AI platform, announced “the completion of its $30 million Series C funding round, co-led by StepStone Group and PayPal Ventures, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Accel, and Basis Set Ventures.”
Melissa Gordon, Rasa CEO, said the funding will help them accelerate their drive to enable businesses to use generative AI.
“With our technology, we’re well-positioned to transform how businesses interact with their customers, making every conversation impactful and personal. We will use the funding to advance our technological leadership and strengthen our market presence.”
Rasa continues to deliver “on its mission to empower the world’s largest brands to address people’s needs with open and extensible conversational AI. Rasa powers sophisticated and robust AI assistants aligned with customers’ business logic that provide meaningful and practical user engagement.”
The recent launches of Rasa Pro and Rasa Studio “with CALM (Conversational AI with Language Models) deliver a major innovation that combines the flexibility, nuanced understanding, and fast time-to-value of Large Language Models (LLMs) with the control and certainty of traditional (NLU-based) chatbots.”
With out-of-the-box conversation handling, CALM “ensures user interactions remain coherent and natural. Rasa Studio adds an intuitive UI that’s built from the ground up for CALM, saving significant development time and reducing costs by reducing the reliance on specialist teams.”
Hunter Somerville, Partner at StepStone Group, said:
“We believe Rasa delivers unparalleled value to its clients by automating or eliminating the most expensive and time-consuming aspects of delivering excellent customer service. Rasa has proven time and again that security-conscious enterprise customers can safely deploy the latest conversational AI, with an elegant low-code platform that offers robust functionality, data privacy, and scale.”
PayPal Ventures joins this round as “the venture firm’s first AI investment, marking the launch of its new AI Fund to invest in early stage AI startups across all industries and verticals.”
Alan Du, PayPal Ventures partner, said:
“We are thrilled to mark the launch of our AI Fund with our investment in Rasa. We believe Rasa offers a best-in-class platform for enterprises to develop robust, conversational AI, and we have seen how its concierge solutions improve customer engagement and business performance.”
Rasa claims that it “powers top banks, major insurers, and global travel and hospitality companies, among others.”
Rasa has been downloaded “more than 50 million times by developers.”
The new funding will also allow Rasa “to continue growing its team, which is dedicated to reshaping the future of AI assistants.”
Rasa is currently hiring several roles “across North America and Europe in Marketing, Sales, Engineering, Customer Success, and more.”
