Espressive Raises $30M Series B To Automate Help Desks

Enterprise service management startup Espressive raised $30 million for its Series B round, the company announced Wednesday.

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Espressive uses artificial intelligence to automate help desks for employee inquiries. Insight Partners led the Series B round, with participation from previous investors General Catalyst and Wing Venture Capital.

The new funding will be used to improve the Santa Clara, California-based company’s Natural Language Processing engine and Barista Employee Language Cloud (ELC), according to a statement from Espressive. The ELC learns new phrases, topics, phrase structures and synonyms as employees ask it questions. It can understand more than 750 million phrases and give personal responses.

Use of the ELC results in a 40 percent to 60 percent reduction in help desk call volume, according to Espressive’s website.

“We’ve received overwhelmingly positive feedback from our customers and prospects about Barista. To address this demand and accelerate expansion into new markets and use cases, we will use this funding to further scale our engineering, sales, and marketing teams as well as continue to cultivate our partner program,” CEO Pat Calhoun said in a statement. “Looking ahead, we’re uniquely positioned to continue our rapid growth, while maintaining our relentless focus on building a highly scalable conversational AI agent that understands the language of employees.”

Along with the new funding, Insight Partners co-founder and managing director Jeff Horing will join Espressive’s board of directors.

Correction: This story was updated to reflect the correct spelling of the company’s name. Crunchbase News regrets the error.

Illustration Credit: Li-Anne Dias