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When we think of artificial intelligence platforms that change our use of voice to interact with phones, home devices and other services, we tend to think of Alexa from Amazon, Apple's Siri, Google and Cortana from Microsoft. But there are other actors who can prove to have a convincing value proposition. Sherpa.ai, a Spanish voice badistant who also provides predictive recommendations focused on the Spanish language, today announced that it has expanded its A series from $ 8.5 to $ 15 million with 5 million active users of its application.
Investors include Mundi Ventures, an AI-focused venture capital fund, and Alex Cruz, chief executive officer of British Airways.
In a still very hot technological climate where startups collect dozens and sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars in tours that sometimes happen a few months apart, the Sherpa Series A has been relatively slow: the start-up first announced a $ 6.5 million series three years ago.
In addition to the fact that European startups tend to increase and spend more conservatively, Xabi Uribe-Etxebarria, founder and CEO of the startup, has chosen to extend this series A now while seeking to close its B series for the end of the year. , which will be around $ 20 million, which will include new investors and probably more details on how it plans to change the business.
"We are announcing several agreements with major equipment manufacturers in the coming months," he said. "I talked to our investors and they thought that it would be better to get a small capital now to launch these deals in order to take advantage of the momentum to get a better valuation of our Series B. "
The company is already working with Porsche to integrate its badistance and referral service into its vehicles. Uribe-Etxebarria announced that future partnerships, on a similar B2B2C model, would be concluded with "other car manufacturers, telecom operators and manufacturers of intelligent loudspeaker devices and PCs. "From what I've heard, Sherpa has been approached by a number of other people who have built voice badistants, as well as by the companies that build the hardware and d & # 39; other objects that will host them. Uribe-Etxebarria did not comment, except to say that he is under NDA with several companies.
"Sherpa.ai Rajeev Singh-Molares, a partner at Mundi Ventures and former president of Alcatel-Lucent Asia-Pacific, said in a statement Rajeev Singh-Molares. "Sherpa has shown phenomenal potential and incredible growth since the first closing of Series A. By increasing our investment in this company, we are able to accelerate the development of Sherpa.ai."
The scale is not everything
At a time when Alexa, by Amazon, exceeds 100 million devices sold, equipped with its voice badistant, Google, Microsoft and Apple seem to quickly catch up by integrating into several Uribe-Etxebarria says it believes that Sherpa stands out from these for several reasons.
The first is the specter of competition, and perhaps the story of how things are happening in the mobile, where operators have really lost their way with users and value-added services with the ramp up applications.
"The companies we work with do not always want agreements with companies that are also competing with them," he said. "Take the telecommunication company we are working with. He has his own video and music offerings, his own retail activities. In the end, they would compete with Apple or Amazon, and would not want to give them access to their users. Car manufacturers could have the same feeling.
The second reason, he says, is related to Sherpa's technology.
When the company started several years ago, voice-based PDAs were still relatively new and all launchers were in English. These days, they all have Spanish versions, so this is no longer a unique selling point. (Of the 5 million users in the company, 80-90% use Sherpa's Spanish content.) And even if it was so, the basic speech recognition and speech synthesis of Sherpa rely on a third technology, to which Uribe-Etxebarria calls "goods".
What's more unique, he says, is the company's predictive recommendations, which are built internally by its team of natural language specialists and other AI specialists. It covers more than 30 categories of specialists covering areas such as automotive, leisure, news, travel, etc., and badyzes 100,000 parameters per user to be able to predict what information a user needs even before A question is asked, that it is news or whatever. That's when you start reading your phone when you wake up, the emails you need to see first, or what you might want to know when you arrive at a particular location.
"This is what interests our competitors the most," he said. "We are at least two or three years ahead of others on this front."
Sherpa has benefited from a boom in the Spanish-speaking world when Samsung contacted the company to preload the application on all its devices sold in these countries. That changed after Samsung launched Bixby, its own badistant, but Uribe-Etxebarria said their partnership was not over yet.
"We are still talking because Bixby can be much better," he said.
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