Solvvy, the leading intelligent self-service platform for customer experience, announced it has raised $12 million in Series A funding led by Scale Venture Partners. The round, which included full participation from existing investors, including Pear Ventures, Signatures Capital and True Ventures, brings the company’s total funding to $16.5 million. As part of the financing, Rory O’Driscoll, Founding Partner at Scale Venture Partners, will join Solvvy’s Board of Directors.

“Customer service is often viewed as a painful experience, but it doesn’t have to be. Recognizing that intelligent automation is the new competitive battleground for customer experience, the most admired brands are turning to us to keep their customers happy. This new investment will allow us to accelerate product development, focus on expanding our team and growing our customer portfolio,” Mahesh Ram, Founding CEO, Solvvy said.

Each year, $300 billion is spent globally on call center agents. However, while 80 percent of companies say they deliver ‘superior’ customer service, only eight percent of their customers agree. Companies are attempting to cut costs and speed up processes by routing customers to articles and bots that unsuccessfully attempt to answer their questions. These solutions fail because the technology is not advanced enough to truly understand the question that the customer is asking.

Created by Ph.D. graduates from Carnegie Mellon University, Solvvy’s intelligent self-service platform uses artificial intelligence and natural language processing to understand and answer questions immediately, even when they are long and complicated, misspelled or phrased in different ways. If an issue requires human assistance, the technology immediately routes the customer to a person. Solvvy reduces customer ticket volume by 20 percent, slashing operating costs and improving customer satisfaction. Because the system is constantly learning from the company’s knowledge base, ticket history and prior customer interactions, it is getting smarter with time. The natural language learning algorithm is on track to achieve 90 percent automation of transactional requests in real-time within five years.

“There is so much hype around artificial intelligence — everywhere you look, companies are branding themselves as AI companies. I’ve been investing in AI technologies for the past twenty years, and I can tell you that very few AI claims these days are credible. Solvvy is one of the few to deliver on the promise of AI,”  Rory O’Driscoll, Founding Partner, Scale Venture Partners said.

In its first year on the market, Solvvy has attracted many leading global brands, including GoFundMe, Peloton, Rover, TaskRabbit and Upwork. The company now supports 200 million users with an average resolution time of one minute. Through this, Solvvy has helped customers save over $15 million just this year.

“Peloton aims to provide the highest-quality experience at every touchpoint, and customer service is no exception. With Solvvy’s intelligent automation platform, we can be confident that the quality of service we provide to our customers meets the standard they’ve come to expect from our brand,” Laura Mundell, Director of Member Support, Peloton said.