PayPal-Backed Rasa Raises $30 Million to Grow Conversational AI Platform

PayPal-backed Rasa has raised $30 million in a Series C round to grow its generative conversational artificial intelligence (AI) platform for enterprises.

The company aims to redefine how businesses use generative AI-powered chat and voice platforms at scale, Rasa said in a Wednesday (Feb. 14) press release.

“With our technology, we’re well positioned to transform how businesses interact with their customers, making every conversation impactful and personal,” Rasa CEO Melissa Gordon said in the release. “We will use the funding to advance our technological leadership and strengthen our market presence.”

Rasa’s open and extensible conversational AI powers AI assistants that align with its customers’ business logic and provides meaningful and practical user engagement, according to the release.

The company’s solutions power two of the world’s top three banks, major insurers, global travel and hospitality companies, and other large, global brands, the release said.

The new funding will allow Rasa to continue growing its team, adding marketing, sales, engineering, customer success and other positions in both North America and Europe, the release said.

The company’s Series C was co-led by StepStone Group and PayPal Ventures, per the release.

“Rasa has proven time and again that security-conscious enterprise customers can safely deploy the latest conversational AI, with an elegant low-code platform that offers robust functionality, data privacy and scale,” Hunter Somerville, partner at StepStone Group, said in the release.

Alan Du, PayPal Ventures partner, added: “We believe Rasa offers a best-in-class platform for enterprises to develop robust, conversational AI, and we have seen how its concierge solutions improve customer engagement and business performance.”

The emergence of genAI has brought the technology’s impact starkly to the forefront of commerce, payments and the broader operating landscape, Doriel Abrahams, head of risk, U.S. and principal technologist at Forter, told PYMNTS in an interview posted Feb. 1.

“With generative AI, you can now talk to computers — we have become less active and the computers are now going to work for us,” Abrahams said.

Conversational AI is also taking automated customer service experiences to a better place, Andrei Papancea, co-founder and CEO of NLX, told PYMNTS in an interview posted in February 2022.

“We’ve seen quite an uptick in demand for call center technology and automation, in particular,” Papancea said.