LivePerson acquires VoiceBase and Tenfold for its conversational AI platform

Conversational AI company LivePerson today announced that it acquired two companies for an undisclosed sum: VoiceBase and Tenfold. VoiceBase provides speech recognition and conversational analytics, while Tenfold develops a platform for integrating communication systems with customer relationship management software and support services.

LivePerson CEO Rob LoCascio says that folding VoiceBase and Tenfold into its existing offerings will support LivePerson’s vision to “help brands gain complete ownership and visibility” over their customer engagements. “Brands want to accelerate their use of voice and conversational AI with deep connective tissue into their systems,” he added in a statement. “It’s my great honor to welcome VoiceBase and Tenfold’s experts to the LivePerson family as we build the unified AI system behind 100% of conversations with the world’s most innovative brands.”

Integrating customer service solutions

VoiceBase, which was founded by Jan Jannink, Jay Blazensky, Spencer Lord, and Walter Bachtiger, emerged from stealth in 2010 as an app for recording and transcribing presentations, meetings, and lectures and conferences before pivoting to a general audio analytics solution. Leveraging a combination of AI and natural language processing, VoiceBase turns unstructured call data into structured, enriched data for analysis. The platform can automatically detect and redact sensitive data from audio and transcripts and analyze calls, email, customer relationship management, and support data across 40 paralinguistic metrics including “silence,” “overtalk,” “dynamism,” and “sentiment.”

Prior to the acquisition, VoiceBase had raised $31.5 million in venture capital.

“Eighty-six percent of buyers are willing to pay more for better customer experiences, meaning huge opportunities open up for brands as we combine VoiceBase’s speech analytics tech with LivePerson’s conversational cloud and AI,” CEO Bachtiger said in a press release. “We are thrilled to team up with a trailblazing industry leader that shares our vision for improving conversations through actionable, AI-powered insights.”

As for Austin, Texas-based Tenfold, which was launched by Blake Robertson, Dan Sincavage, Patrick Hogan, and Sean Pinegar in 2015, it provides a service that connects on-premise and cloud voice platforms to customer relationship management systems. Tenfold counts Wayfair, TransAmerica, and Sixt among its customers.

CEO Jeff Cotten says that, with Tenfold — backed by $34.6 million in capital, some contributed by Andreessen Horowitz and Next Coast Ventures — LivePerson messaging will become available to more customer service agents via customer relationship management systems, desktops, and brands’ integrated solutions. “Today marks an exciting day for Tenfold, our employees, and our customers as we join LivePerson,” he added in a statement. “We’ve solved a difficult challenge in delivering the most relevant data right into every customer interaction, and with LivePerson, we’ll expand this model to messaging to deliver a true end-to-end customer experience platform.”

LivePerson, a 26-year-old, publicly held company headquartered in New York, is best known as the developer of the Conversational Cloud, a software platform that allows consumers to message with brands in real time. In 2018, following the acquisitions of bot platform BotCentral and conversational commerce startup Conversable, the company announced its AI offering, allowing businesses to create AI-powered chatbots to answer customer messages alongside human agents.