Astound Launches and Announces $11.5 Million in Funding

Astound, an enterprise software company applying machine learning and natural language processing to automate service and support, today announced its launch and $11.5 Million in Series A funding, co-led by Vertex Ventures and Pelion Venture Partners with participation from The Hive, Slack Fund, and Moment Ventures.

“Employee service has to change,” said Dan Turchin, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer, Astound (formerly Neva). “For as long as technology has been used inside of corporations, I don’t know anyone who gets excited when they need to call the help desk. We’re bringing the power of AI to global service organizations and helping deliver a radically better user experience.  We’re proud of the value we’re creating and excited to be launching with incredible customers like McDonald’s and adidas.”

Astound makes work life more efficient for employees at large enterprises by automating the resolution of routine support issues like password resets, application configuration, and network outages. Its AI platform uses machine learning and natural language processing to automate answers to common questions to reduce call volume up to 70 percent. In addition, this automation reduces mean time to resolution by up to 60 percent and cost per ticket from an average of $25 to $1.50.

Astound was co-founded by Dr. Naghi Prasad, CEO, who holds a PhD in artificial intelligence and has brought to market many successful data-driven enterprise software products in past roles, and Dan Turchin, Chief Product Officer, who has two decades of experience working with CIOs as an entrepreneur and product leader in data science for Enterprise Service Management.

“As every company becomes more dependent on technology, employee support is becoming business-essential,” states Sandeep Bhadra, Partner at Vertex Ventures. “Astound’s founding team possesses background in that uniquely positions them to address this need and transform the industry as we know it.”

The Astound AI platform includes the following apps:

• Predict: Automatically classifies tickets by category and assigns them to the correct agents, eliminating the error-prone task of manually reviewing and routing tickets.
• Advise: Surfaces, analyzes and correlates data from disparate systems of record to enrich tickets with relevant content, allowing support agents to quickly execute complex tasks and fully automate common requests.
• Answers: Fully-autonomous agents use natural language processing, understanding, and natural language generation to help employees interactively ask questions, submit incidents and order goods and services via voice, chat, web portals, and native apps
• Analyze: Predictive analytics dashboards provide insights to managers about service health based on historical data trends. Intuitive visualizations monitor business KPIs and show how AI-driven automation benefits employees.

About Astound
Astound is purpose-built for enterprise service management and automates answers to routine questions, accurately assigns & categorizes incidents, recommends the best resolutions, and delivers predictive analytics. Astound partners with leading enterprise IT software vendors like ServiceNow, Atlassian, and Salesforce to offer out of the box integrations with ITSM, knowledge management, Customer Service Management (CSM), and social collaboration solutions. Astound helps some of the most-respected organizations in the world reduce call volume, MTTR and support costs, while improving customer satisfaction. Learn more about Astound at www.astound.ai or follow the company on Twitter @astound_ai.