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Redefining the Customer Experience with GenAI: Why We’re Excited to Once Again Back UJET
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Redefining the Customer Experience with GenAI: Why We’re Excited to Once Again Back UJET
Published
September 24, 2024
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Customer service experiences can make or break a brand. No longer do people have the patience for long hold times, getting bounced between departments, or being relegated to speaking with impersonal robot voices that just don’t get it. In a world where we have self-driving cars and AI music artists, it’s hard to believe that organizations with contact centers worldwide still rely on outdated technology from decades past—leaving the everyday consumer to bear with the consequences.

A major overhaul has been underway over the last several years with the shift from legacy on-premise communication solutions to cloud-based platforms. Companies like Five9 (a prior Sapphire Ventures portfolio company) and NICE led the first migration wave, but with the need for more scalable and flexible solutions spanning multiple channels, a new generation of contact center solutions has emerged.

Enter UJET. When we led the company’s Series C back in 2020, we highlighted the company’s critical differentiators: leading with multimodal omnichannel to personalize customer journeys and leveraging AI to supercharge agent efficiency. Today, AI is not only an inescapable buzzword but also the catalyst driving yet another seismic transformation in the contact center industry, and UJET is leading the charge with its AI-powered contact center platform. We’re thrilled to be leading the company’s Series D, further deepening our partnership with co-CEOs Anand, Vasili and the UJET team.

Leading The Way in Bringing AI to Multi-Channel Customer Experiences

UJET’s platform was built from the ground up to address the modern needs of organizations and their customers. Its highly scalable, cloud-native architecture and multi-channel approach was designed to deliver seamless and personalized customer experiences regardless of channel—whether over the phone, on the web, in-app and over text.

While this foundation has already positioned UJET at the forefront of innovation among contact center platforms, the team went one step further by purpose-building the platform with AI in mind from day one. Since our initial partnership, UJET has weaved several AI-based capabilities into the core workflows of its platform. Among others, these include intelligent virtual agents, which support human-like conversation to offload tasks traditionally supported by live agents, and Agent Assist, equipping agents with several tools to amplify their efficiency while materially improving employee satisfaction and retention.

Developments in generative AI are poised to once again transform customer experiences and expectations as support interactions become richer, higher-bandwidth and more contextual. With its modern architecture, multimodality and mobile-first approach, UJET is uniquely positioned to lead this immense transformation.

We’re not alone in recognizing the current and future potential of UJET. In 2022, UJET established a strategic technology partnership with Google Cloud to extend the Google Contact Center AI platform to include a complete cloud-native CCaaS platform with UJET’s support. UJET has also racked up several industry accolades, winning the Cloud-Based CX Solution of the Year at the 2024 CX Awards, Google Cloud Partner of the Year at Google Next 2023 and Cloud-Based CX Solution of the Year at the 2023 CCW Excellence Awards among several others. 

Co-CEOs: Pairing Innovation & Insight to Transform Customer Service

Anand Janefalkar,

Founding CEO of UJET

What excites us most about leading UJET’s Series D is the opportunity to partner with outstanding leaders who come to the table with earned yet differentiated perspectives. UJET’s Founding CEO Anand Janefalkar didn’t come from a traditional contact center background. Instead, he drew from his own negative experiences with outdated systems to design a new platform that would tackle the problems facing contact centers and support teams today.

Vasili Triant,

Co-CEO of UJET

He is now accompanied at the helm by Co-CEO Vasili Triant, who joined UJET as COO four years ago, bringing decades of sector experience in the contact center industry. Together, Anand and Vasili are blending technological innovation with deep domain expertise and commercial excellence to tackle the long-standing challenges of the industry while empowering businesses to fully leverage the potential of AI for their CX.

At Sapphire Ventures, we’re proud to invest in what we believe are Companies of Consequence. We have a long history of partnering with category-defining and redefining companies including Five9, Monday.com, DocuSign, Box and Alteryx among several others. UJET is redefining what software platforms can do for contact centers with its modern architecture and AI platform, enabling support teams to holistically understand the customer journey while providing delightful support experiences efficiently and effectively. With this new financing round, we are both honored and excited to once again support the team in its next chapter of growth.

Legal disclaimer

Nothing presented within this article is intended to constitute investment advice, and under no circumstances should any information provided herein be used or considered as an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy an interest in any investment fund managed by Sapphire Ventures (“Sapphire”). Information provided reflects Sapphires’ views as of a time, whereby such views are subject to change at any point and Sapphire shall not be obligated to provide notice of any change. Companies mentioned in this article are a representative sample of portfolio companies in which Sapphire has invested in which the author believes such companies fit the objective criteria stated in commentary, which do not reflect all investments made by Sapphire. A complete alphabetical list of Sapphire’s investments made by Its direct growth and sports investing strategies is available here. No assumptions should be made that investments described were or will be profitable. Due to various risks and uncertainties, actual events, results or the actual experience may differ materially from those reflected or contemplated in these statements. Nothing contained in this article may be relied upon as a guarantee or assurance as to the future success of any particular company. Past performance is not indicative of future results.