Philipp Heltewig, who was CIO of marketing company Sitecore before it was sold to private equity group EQT in 2016, joined forces with Sascha Poggemann and Benjamin Mayr eight years ago to found Cognigy, a customer service automation startup. The impetus was what they perceived as confusion about AI’s capabilities among both consumers and C-suite executives, Heltewig says — particularly confusion about AI’s limitations.
“Big tech companies have ‘ill-defined’ expectations when it comes to AI,” Heltewig told TechCrunch. “In 2015, IBM claimed that its Watson platform could do it all. In 2024, this will return as ‘Copilot can do it all’. Neither is true.
With Cognigy, Heltewig, Poggemann and Mayr sought to fulfill a more humble promise: to help create an AI that could handle the highly repetitive, mechanical processes that center workers face every day.
AI for contact centers is not a new trend. According to a survey, more than half of companies have already invested in AI capabilities to support their customer service operations. According to market research firm Markets and Markets, revenue in the call center AI market alone is expected to rise from $1.6 billion in 2022 to $4.1 billion by the end of 2027.
In addition to big tech companies, many startups offer AI-based products to automate basic call center tasks. There’s Parloa, which focuses on text-to-speech apps; Kore.ai, which is developing enterprise-focused conversational AI applications; Lang, whose technology automatically tags and categorizes customer conversations; and PolyAI and Retell AI, both building autonomous phone agents.
So what sets Cognigy apart? On the one hand, the platform can be deployed on-premises or in a private or public cloud (e.g. AWS). And it’s scalable; Cognigy manages AI agents that can handle tens of thousands of customer conversations at the same time.
“Cognigy provides a platform to build, operate and analyze AI agents for customer experiences in the contact center,” said Heltewig. “In addition to serving end customers, the same AI agents switch roles to act as ‘copilot’ agents, providing contextual assistance to human agents and automating routine tasks such as closing calls.”
Cognigy sells three main products: (1) a self-service Q&A chatbot that draws on an organization’s knowledge base to answer customer questions, (2) a set of tools for creating chatbot experiences, and (3) ) an AI-powered support agent dashboard to serve potentially useful information to agents during customer interactions.
Cognigy trains its own generative AI models to power aspects of its platform. But it also integrates third-party models, such as OpenAI’s recently released GPT-4o, Anthropic’s Claude 3, Google’s Gemini, and Aleph Alpha’s Luminous.
The vendor-agnostic and bring-your-own-model approach may be one of the reasons why Cognigy has grown so robustly in recent years.
The company today has around 175 customers implementing Cognigy contact center solutions across 1,000 different brands, including Toyota and Bosch, and just this week, Cognigy closed a sizable Series C led by French private equity group Eurazeo. Together with Insight Partners, DTCP and DN Capital, Eurazeo invested $100 million in Cognigy, bringing Cognigy’s total raised to $175 million.
With a workforce of 175 people based in Düsseldorf and San Francisco, which Heltewig expects to grow to 250 by the end of the year, Cognigy plans to invest the new capital in US geographic expansion and product R&D.
“Our goal is to enable the creation of more sophisticated customer service solutions and the acceleration of AI technologies that deliver a return on investment,” said Heltewig.
