Talkdesk’s former COO joins Replicant to lead the customer service industry into the age of artificial intelligence and autonomous call flows

Replicant, a cutting-edge provider of artificial intelligence-enabled voice technologies, announced today $7 million in seed funding to launch their platform solution and revolutionize the contact center industry with AI voice technology. The round included participation from Atomic, Bloomberg Beta, Costanoa Ventures, and Norwest Venture Partners.

In addition to the new funding, Gadi Shamia, former Chief Operating Officer of cloud contact center leader, Talkdesk, has joined Replicant as Chief Executive Officer.  Shamia joins as CEO after a four-year run helping to build Talkdesk from a seed-stage company to the first and only call center software “unicorn”.

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Replicant is introducing an innovative way for contact centers to deal with tedious, repetitive customer service calls at scale. Replicant has built state‑of‑the‑art AI voice technology that enables full phone conversations between a bot—the “Thinking Machine”—and a customer. Once deployed, Replicant can take care of common call flows, and escalate the more complex and emotional calls to live agents.

How it works:

• The Thinking Machine understands full sentences in real‑time, rather than just processing keywords.
• Based on this understanding, the Thinking Machine makes rapid decisions, responds in under a second, and takes action to solve the problem at hand, like updating shipping addresses or issuing refunds.
• When it can’t handle an issue, the Thinking Machine passes the call to an agent, with a bullet-point summary of the progress to enable a smooth transition, with no lost time.

“Agents are frustrated by answering the same questions 100 times a day. Callers suffer from long wait times and inconsistent service while companies find it hard to control costs and scale without impacting customer satisfaction,” said Shamia, Replicant’s CEO. “Our AI solution lessens those pain points while improving customer service.”

Replicant’s AI frees up customer service agents to deal with more complex, fulfilling work and, gives both the customer and the agent a better experience all around.

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“AI can power long‑running voice conversations between smart virtual agents and customers to solve real problems at scale,” said Scott Beechuk, Partner at Norwest Venture Partners. “Replicant is leading this new wave of automation and is far ahead of any competing product with bots that sound and feel amazingly real.”

Replicant spent two years developing proprietary AI technology that engages customers in full conversations, which feel natural, conversational, and speedy.

“Replicant engages with our customers and helps them in meaningful ways. We aren’t simply deflecting calls. It feels more like Replicant is a new member of the team that helps our staff focus on higher impact calls and deliver to a higher standard of customer service,” says Ross Rader, Chief Customer Experience Officer at Tucows Inc., a publicly-traded company based in Toronto.

Replicant’s Thinking Machine answers customer calls 24/7 with zero wait time and offers contact centers the same elasticity that Amazon Web Services provides to data centers. Agent satisfaction increases since they can focus on more complex and interesting tasks. Customer satisfaction improves since they no longer need to wait or repeat themselves. Businesses reduce costs while increasing customer satisfaction.

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