Espressive, a pioneer in artificial intelligence (AI) for enterprise service management (ESM), announced $30 million in Series B funding led by global venture capital and private equity firm Insight Partners with participation from Series A investors, General Catalyst, and Wing Venture Capital. Jeff Horing, co-Founder and Managing Director at Insight Partners will also be joining the Espressive Board of Directors. Espressive will use this newest capital infusion to fuel company growth and product innovation, while addressing the demands of its rapidly growing customer base. Espressive Barista, the company’s virtual support agent (VSA), automates help desks by connecting employees to the information they need.
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According to Forrester Research, businesses that use AI and other emerging technologies will capture $1.2 trillion in revenue a year, growing at least eight times faster than the global GDP. Similarly, According to Gartner, Inc., in 2021, AI augmentation will generate “$2.9 trillion in business value and 6.2 billion hours of worker productivity.”1 With Barista, Espressive provides businesses with an AI-based ESM solution that benefits both enterprise employees and help desk agents. In a separate announcement today, Espressive revealed new innovations to Barista that make it possible to automate help desks with AI, minimize tier 1 support, and provide users with consumer-like self-help.
“Adoption of AI for IT service management (ITSM) and ESM is exploding and Espressive’s advanced automation capabilities stand to significantly disrupt this evolving market. We were immediately impressed with Espressive Barista and its ability to provide an innovative solution that expands beyond the ITSM use case into HR, facilities, and more,” said Jeff Horing, co-Founder and Managing Director at Insight Partners. “This sentiment was further validated by comprehensive feedback we received from Espressive’s partners and customers which resulted in a net promoter score of 73, placing Espressive in the ‘excellent’ category. We are excited to work with Espressive to scale its product and become a leader in the ITSM and ESM space.”
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Espressive NLP Engine Optimized to Understand Employee Language
With its new capital, Espressive will continue to build on the company’s Natural Language Processing (NLP) engine and the Barista Employee Language Cloud (ELC). The ELC provides a personalized response to commonly asked questions, with the ability to understand 750 million phrases and growing. As employees ask questions, Barista learns new phrases, phrase structures, synonyms and topics, enabling the ELC to expand and grow automatically. The ELC also uses machine learning to identify the correct team or department when a question can’t be immediately answered. As a result, organizations using Barista can build a highly scalable conversational AI agent optimized to understand the language of employees without the need for AI expertise.
“We’ve received overwhelmingly positive feedback from our customers and prospects about Barista. To address this demand and accelerate expansion into new markets and use cases, we will use this funding to further scale our engineering, sales, and marketing teams as well as continue to cultivate our partner program,” said Pat Calhoun, CEO and founder of Espressive. “Looking ahead, we’re uniquely positioned to continue our rapid growth, while maintaining our relentless focus on building a highly scalable conversational AI agent that understands the language of employees.”
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