Voice-based conversational AI firm curious thing raises almost $7M pre-series funding. It was led by private firm Hawkstone with participation from Blacksheep capital, January capital and returns investors Rinventure and Qualgro.
The firm has had 3 million minutes of Al-human conversations in the last 12 months. And up to 200k phone calls handled on a single day. The firm is built by a team of scientists, software developers, business specialists and software developers. The team believes in solving the problems of organizations by bringing AI to life.
Expedite business and consumer comfort
According to the firm, the investment is design to bring consumer comfort and advance businesses. It adopts a voice AI assistant and makes normalization of the human-Al relationship. Curious Thing had formerly raised $1.5 million from Rinventure and Qualgro in 2019.
With co-founders Sam Zheng Han Xu and David Mckeague at the helm, Curious Thing has plans to accelerate the business to other fields. Such as financial services, and health and technology companies are consider for expansion. Additionally to building out further offerings in its key industries. Curious Thing will expand its global footprint in Southeast Asia and the United States.
Among Top 5 Rising Stars at the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 awards for 2021
Since its initiation, the firm show fast growth per year. It is recognize among the Top 5 Rising Stars at the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 awards for 2021. The latest investment comes after the firm experienced strong growth.
According to Zheng, “Helping businesses reimagine B2C communication is the core of Curious Thing’s mission as there is an increasing misalignment between customer expectation and what businesses can deliver when communicating with customers. In the past, businesses usually dealt with a static view of customer touchpoints.
“We look forward to using this funding to continuously build our unique voice AI technology as well as deepen our expertise in human-AI trust and conversational user experience – at a time when voice AI rapidly emerges from a ‘good to have to ‘strategic business tool,’” said Zheng.
John Hollingsworth, managing director of Hawkstone Asia Pacific, said: “There is certainly a lot of work to be done in the voice AI space around appealing to users on the benefits of this technology as well as creating more positive human-AI relationships. We have every confidence in Curious Thing playing a leading role in the growing adoption of voice AI,” Mr Hollingsworth continued.
