Kore.ai Gets $150 Million to Develop Conversational AI Platform

Kore.ai has raised $150 million to develop its conversational/generative artificial intelligence platform technology.

The funding round, announced Tuesday (Jan. 30), was led by FTV Capital and included a contribution from chip maker Nvidia.

The Orlando, Florida-based company said it will use the funds to expand the use of its generative artificial intelligence (AI) platform, designed to — per a news release — “help companies of all sizes power business interactions with AI safely and responsibly while driving significant revenue and cost savings.”

According to the release, Kore.ai’s platform lets teams craft custom solutions or deploy pre-built, domain-trained virtual assistants” for functions like IT and human resources in industries such as banking, healthcare and retail.

“Sitting above the infrastructure layer and LLM chaos, our open approach grants businesses freedom of choice with built-in guardrails for effective AI implementation,” said Raj Koneru, Kore.ai’s founder and CEO.

Kore.ai’s funding announcement came one day after AI company Sema4.ai had raised $30.5 million in funding to bring open source-powered AI to enterprise work.

“Traditionally, AI has struggled to support the complex workflows of knowledge workers,” PYMNTS wrote. “While large language models (LLMs) can summarize vast amounts of information and interact with humans, they lack the ability to manage ambiguity, adapt to changing context and take action.”

Sema4.ai says it aims to bridge this gap by allowing for meaningful human-AI collaboration.

Meanwhile, PYMNTS spoke with Eric Lefebvre, chief technology officer at Sovos, about the role AI is playing in the payments space, in an interview posted on Tuesday.

He noted that anti-fraud efforts are one area with a lot of opportunity for this technology. Fraudsters already use AI to impersonate people and entities, so the goal of banks and businesses is to make sure transactions are legitimate.

As payments get closer to real-time status, there’s an “AI arms race” in battling the bad actors, which means that companies must play both offense and defense.

In doing so, “we’re mining this data to create rules from that data,” as the transactions are seen in real time, allowing businesses to be proactive about catching fraudsters in their tracks, instead of reactive, said Lefebvre.