Invoca, which focuses on call tracking and conversational analytics, announced Thursday it added $56 million in new capital from a variety of investors, bringing the company's total financing to
$116 million.
Existing investor Upfront Ventures and new investor H.I.G. Growth Partners led the round, with participation from Accel and Morgan Stanley Alternative Investment
Partners.
"We see conversational and voice interfaces continuing to proliferate, which creates exciting new opportunities to apply Invoca technology and help brands build better
connections with customers," Gregg Johnson, CEO Invoca.
Invoca plans to use the funding to accelerate the development of its products and broaden its list of partners in digital
advertising, marketing technology, CRM, and affiliate marketing.
The funding will support the company’s growth as the annual number of mobile phone calls to businesses reaches 169
billion by 2020, according to BIA Kelsey. The analysis firm also estimates click-to-call influences more than $1 trillion in U.S. consumer spending.
Some of the AI-powered call-tracking
technology includes a platform released earlier this month. Signal Discovery uses a machine-learning model to analyze buying conversations between consumers and brands in the contact center to help
marketers understand the factors that influence purchases.
Signal Discovery uses what Invoca refers to as a call map that visually represents similar conversations as topic bubble. The
technology listens to each call and generates conversation clusters. It uses the analysis to predict events in future conversations based on the speech patterns.
Along with the introduction of
Signal Discovery, Invoca released a report on the state of first-party data.
The analysis analyzes responses from 500 U.S. business-to-consumer (B2C) marketers with at least three years of
experience and oversee budgets of more than $1 million across a range of companies and industries. The survey was in the field in July and August 2019.
While 56% of marketers access
data about customer interactions from phone calls, only 8% say it’s the top source they use to inform personalization. The data attempts to demonstrate that too many brands do not use their
first-party available data, specifically from phone calls, to customize campaigns.