Replicant — the future of customer service

When we started Replicant in 2017, we certainly did not predict that a global pandemic would create a customer service disaster, suddenly accelerating businesses into AI and automation. We “merely” believed that machines were ready to have useful, complex conversations with people and that the future business applications of this could be profound.

We look around us today (while living in a dystopian scene from our namesake film) and know the world has turned upside down over the past six months. For businesses — call centers have shut down due to Covid-19, customer service call volumes have surged unpredictability, and customers are more frustrated than ever with long wait times leading to unresolved issues. Replicant’s autonomous call center is now enabling these businesses to fully resolve customer issues (even the most complex ones) over the phone with natural-sounding conversations — improving the customer experience while reducing costs.

Hundreds of millions of consumers use voice assistants such as Amazon Alexa or Apple’s Siri for simple tasks in their daily lives. Now, one company wants to take talking bots to the next level: the highly conversational field of customer service.

Replicant, named after Blade Runner’s genetically engineering humans, is entering uncharted territory with its software… — Forbes

Startups have moments. Replicant’s is now. The company is now handling over two million autonomous customer support calls a month, grown over 15X in revenue in just six months, and is partnering with some of the largest enterprises and call centers in the world. We’re inspired by how this incredible team, led by our co-founders Gadi Shamia (CEO) and Benjamin Gleitzman (CTO), have fearlessly seized their moment during this pandemic to help businesses and customers across the globe.

We’re excited to share today that with Replicant, Atomic has made one of our most significant investments in any company to-date, and partnered with Scott Beechuk at Norwest Venture Partners who led a $27 million investment in the company, alongside a group of co-investors deeply experienced with the intersection of AI and the enterprise: Mark Selcow at Costanoa Ventures, James Cham at Bloomberg Beta, and State Farm Ventures. Scott, who is intimately familiar with the customer service software industry from his time as SVP Product for Salesforce Service Cloud points out why Replicant is well positioned:

(Replicant’s) attention to this humanscale connection is what sets them apart in the customer service arena: they start with the experience between caller and agent and build their AI-driven product around it. The result is a first-of-its-kind product that honors the human aspect of customer service no matter how automated operations get.

The company has come a long way from its humble beginnings converting our storage closet into a closely guarded private office where Benjamin Gleitzman’s hand-picked team of AI and machine learning engineers started building the world’s first autonomous call center. But we know this is just the beginning and couldn’t be more hopeful about the future of customer service.