A week ago, Cresta, an artificial intelligence company from Silicon Valley, was added to the list of global Unicorn enterprises. According to Cresta's official website, the company completed a round C financing of US $80 million on March 17, with a valuation of US $1.6 billion. Cresta, headquartered in San Francisco, aims to use artificial intelligence technology to improve the professionalism and intelligence of customer service and sales teams. From its official launch in 2020 to becoming a technological unicorn, Cresta has only taken two years. At present, it is one of the fastest-growing artificial intelligence enterprises in the world. Last year, Cresta was also listed by Forbes as one of the 50 most promising AI startups in the world. The picture is taken from the list of CB insights global Unicorn companies It is worth noting that Cresta is also a start-up company of "Stanford Department". The three co founders are Zayd ENAM and Tim Shi, doctoral students of Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and Sebastian Thrun, Professor of Stanford University, "father of automatic driving" and founder of udacity. Among them, Tim Shi, who is now the CTO of Cresta, studied in Yao class of Tsinghua University. He once went to MIT for further study with the first place of Yao class, and then studied for a doctorate in artificial intelligence at Stanford University. In addition to Tim Shi, there are many Chinese engineers in Cresta's core team, including Wu Ping, founder of Google cloud intelligent dialogue platform. Forbes AI 50 2021: America's most promising artistic intelligence companies The business grows at a high speed, and the annual income doubles In fact, as early as last year, silicon star people noticed the development potential of Cresta and made a comprehensive and in-depth introduction to Cresta's business. In short, Cresta's main goal is to help enterprises solve the problem of dialogue based customer service and sales through cutting-edge and mature artificial intelligence technology. Cresta believes that dialogue based customer service and sales business are very important in today's consumer economy, but they have not received the attention matching their importance. At present, the total number of people engaged in the customer service industry in the world has reached about 17 million, and a large number of customer service personnel are communicating with users by telephone, text and video every day. However, there are generally problems of lack of training and insufficient manpower in the industry. Employees often work overtime and seriously lack a sense of work achievement. According to the report of Aberdeen, a market research organization, it has been pointed out that the turnover rate of customer service personnel is very high. It takes at least seven months for new customer service personnel to reach the proficiency level, but most of them will give up or be eliminated halfway. But customer service and sales center is a facade business for a company. A conversation can achieve or destroy a cooperation or even a brand. At present, few technology companies focus on solving the problems of customer service industry based on various dialogue scenarios. Cresta aims at this slightly blank market segment with great potential. Since its establishment in 2017, Cresta has begun to secretly develop a complete set of artificial intelligence system, which aims to end the current situation that has plagued the customer service and sales industry for a long time, so as to help enterprises improve the customer experience of the whole brand. So far, Cresta has mainly provided enterprises with three types of intelligent customer service solutions: for agents, for managers and for leadership. For customer service personnel, through real-time and AI driven assistance and guidance, they can automatically perform operations such as emotion recognition, intelligent response, knowledge base query and automatic recording. For managers, Cresta will track the performance of agents and provide end-to-end guidance for managers by analyzing each dialogue of customer service, so as to improve the quality of customer service more specifically. On this basis, Cresta can also provide executable suggestions for the company based on the performance and feedback of the whole customer service center, including effectively identifying hot topics, emotional problems and competitive problems, so as to help enterprises achieve a more intelligent and sensitive customer experience. The picture is from the official website of Cresta According to the official data of Cresta, by using their AI intelligent customer service system, enterprises have increased customer satisfaction by an average of 20%, reduced manual processing time by 10%, and reduced the repetitive work of manual seats by 5 hours per week. In the past year, Cresta's revenue has tripled and has made millions of dollars in profits. For the recent rapid growth of Cresta's business, silicon star also interviewed Wu Ping, the person in charge of Cresta's products and engineering. Wu Ping worked at Google for 13 years. Before leaving Google, he was a core executive of Google's smart cloud. Wu Ping joined Google in 2008 and is one of the founding engineers of Google's mobile advertising team. He once participated in building Google's core cash flow business. In 2017, he joined Google cloud and was responsible for initiating and leading the developer oriented platform of Google smart cloud and several artificial intelligence products and solutions for enterprises, one of which is the contact center AI (CCAI) platform. Wu Ping believes that AI has great development potential in various enterprise dialogue scenarios. "From the perspective of the general environment, the epidemic has made many customer service centers remote, and many customer service personnel work at home, which means that more digital transformation is needed to realize observation and real-time counseling. At the same time, the problems of wage rise and labor shortage in recent years have become more and more obvious, and objectively, more automatic tools are required to improve the efficiency of manual labor." Wu Ping also said that from the technical level, at present, the customer service center is transferring to the cloud, the whole technology stack is being rebuilt in the cloud, the deep learning of voice and natural language processing have reached an inflection point, and more application scenarios are being unlocked. The two-year valuation exceeded 1.6 billion, behind which there were many star investors Although Cresta was founded in 2017, the company has remained invisible for nearly three years, focusing on developing the underlying AI technology that can achieve the goal of intelligent customer service. It was not until the beginning of 2020 that Cresta officially started financing with its formed products. Since then, it has embarked on the development road of "opening and hanging". In February 2020, Cresta received the first round of 6 million seed investment from star venture capital a16z in Silicon Valley. A month later, it officially received a round of 15 million US dollars from veteran venture capital Greylock partners, a16z and Porsche, with a valuation of about US $500 million at that time. In March 2021, Cresta received another $50 million investment from Sequoia Capital. In the round C financing just completed last week, more top institutions participated. This round of investment is led by the Tiger Fund. In addition to the previous Sequoia, a16z and Porsche, venture capital and large companies such as JPMorgan Chase, zoom, five9 and Genesys are also involved in this round of investment. The picture is cut from the enterprise According to Forbes, previously, zoom had tried to acquire five9, a smart contact center provider, at a high price of $14.7 billion. At that time, zoom mainly focused on five9's "contact center as a service" solution and wanted to integrate with zoom's "unified communication as a service", so as to form a more intelligent and efficient customer service solution and completely change the contact mode between enterprises and customers. Although the acquisition agreement failed later, it is interesting that zoom invested in Cresta together with five9 and Genesys, another intelligent communication giant, to complete its layout of intelligent customer service. The joint investment of several giants of communication platform in Cresta also confirms the maturity of its products. At present, Cresta's customers already include large enterprises such as Verizon, Carmax and Porsche. Cresta said that the most important driving force of its business growth in the past year was the expansion of existing users' cooperation, and the net retention rate of users even exceeded 200%. These companies often try out in a small range first, and then gradually expand to a larger business scope. In addition, at present, Cresta's system can also be quickly integrated into platforms including salesforce, Amazon connect, five9 and so on in real time. In this regard, Wu Ping said, "at present, many challenging tasks of Cresta are not only at the technical level, but also how to deploy artificial intelligence into traditional systems and establish scalable systems and processes." Next, Cresta will continue to develop more cutting-edge customer service solutions with the funds raised in this round, such as automatically collecting and analyzing more useful information in the conversation with customers. At present, Cresta has about 150 employees and has offices in Silicon Valley, Toronto, Europe and other places. Cresta told Sistar that with the expansion of business, it is possible to add an office center in China in the next step, and will continue to recruit professionals in related fields in the future. (Xinhua News Agency)