Palo ALto, Jan. 22, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Apprente, an emerging AI technology company, today announced it has raised $4.75 million in seed funding to grow its research and development team and further product development. Investors include AME Cloud Ventures, Greylock Partners via Discovery Fund, Morado Ventures, Pathbreaker Ventures and StageOne Ventures, as well as notable angel investors Georges Harik and Jaan Tallinn.
Apprente is building the next generation of conversational, intelligent, interactive machines leveraging its proprietary neuroscience-based AI technology. The company’s technology facilitates lifelong learning (i.e. the ability to capture new information on-the-fly while not forgetting prior information), a concept that comes naturally to humans but not to machines. By designing systems that learn progressively, just as children do when acquiring language, Apprente is poised to dramatically improve the customer service industry.
“Poor customer service is costing businesses more than $60 billion each year, and there’s a massive opportunity to improve conversational-based support experiences,” said Itamar Arel, CEO of Apprente. “Apprente can effectively automate customer service initiatives by providing machine agents that continually learn from interacting with humans and incrementally build on simple-to-complex findings. The result is higher quality, lower cost customer service and more positive, productive and personalized support experiences for consumers.”
“Apprente is working on solving some of the most fundamental problems in machine learning,” said John Lilly, partner at Greylock Partners. “Their technology aims to augment the efforts of an overburdened workforce by offering additional resources that are as helpful, reactive and engaging as humans.”
Prominent neuroscientist and Apprente advisor Dr. David Eagleman added, “The promise of AI is boundless, but the technology has drifted away from neuroscience. Since the human brain remains the most complex system in our universe, we need to take AI to the next level by applying our knowledge about the extraordinary processing device sitting atop our shoulders. I’m excited to support Apprente in their pursuit of neuroscience-inspired mechanisms for learning and memory, which will pave the way for the future of intelligent machines.”
About Apprente
Apprente is a privately held company in Palo Alto, California building intelligent, conversational agents for customer service applications. Leveraging proprietary neuroscience-based AI technology, the company is creating integratable systems that are naturally engaging, capable of understanding context and able to offer the same sense of immediacy found in human interactions. Apprente helps businesses and their employees minimize customer wait times, boost service productivity and improve customer experience quality.