Novo Labs, a provider of conversational artificial intelligence services for large restaurant chains, announced $2 million in seed funding, led by Silverton Partners. With the financing, Roger Chen of Silverton Partners will join Novo Labs’ Board of Directors.

Novo Labs was founded in 2017 in Dallas by Clinton Coleman and Jeff Loukas. Last year the company launched its automated service for taking restaurant orders through high-volume voice channels. The service allows customers to place an order conversationally as they normally would through channels that they already use, such as calling a restaurant on the phone to place an order. The new funding will be used to accelerate client deployments and integrate with additional voice channels.

“Many customers still prefer the ease of using their voice to place orders, and our service allows restaurants to serve customers through convenient voice channels in a prompt, efficient manner.” said Coleman, CEO of Novo Labs. “Restaurant chains have increasingly adopted a digital-first strategy for driving sales, and we build on that by going beyond just automation to use a breadth of data to personalize and optimize voice interactions.”

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The Novo Labs end-to-end service uses a proprietary natural language processing stack to handle the real-world conditions of how customers actually speak when they place orders through existing voice channels. It was built for the needs of enterprise restaurant chains, with a highly scalable infrastructure and native menu and point-of-sale integrations. Today the service handles thousands of live customer phone orders each week and later this year will be available for other high-volume voice channels, such as restaurant drive-throughs, as well as emerging voice channels, such as digital assistants and kiosks.

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“We’re excited to back Novo Labs because they’ve proven their value with restaurant chains,” said Chen of Silverton.

Investing alongside Silverton in the round is entrepreneur Hal Brierley, who is a pioneer of customer engagement and loyalty programs.

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