Invoca Raises $56M to Help Marketers Turn Conversational Insights into Revenue
The company is experiencing 75% year-over-year growth with blue-chip customers including Dish Network, Dignity Health, and U.S. Bank
SANTA BARBARA, Calif., Oct. 17, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- Invoca, the leader in AI-powered call tracking and conversational analytics, today announced it has raised $56 million in new capital, bringing the company's total financing to date to $116 million. The financing was led by existing investor Upfront Ventures and new investor H.I.G. Growth Partners, with participation from other investors including Accel and Morgan Stanley Alternative Investment Partners.
This latest funding round comes on the heels of 75% year-over-year bookings growth in the first half of 2019. Invoca serves innovative marketers at leading brands like Dish Network, U.S. Bank, Dignity Health, and Gusto, and continues to deepen strategic partnerships with Google, Facebook, Adobe, and Salesforce. Invoca plans to double headcount over the next three years and was recognized today as a Fortune Best Workplace — a testament to the company's investment in building a transparent, supportive, and inclusive culture.
"With digital advertising spend expected to near $400 billion next year, marketers are investing heavily in Google and Facebook to drive awareness and customer acquisition," said Gregg Johnson, CEO of Invoca. "Yet over 90% of commerce still happens offline via contact centers and retail stores, especially in industries with more complex, expensive products. Brands are struggling to connect digital advertising investments to the human conversations that drive sales. Invoca addresses this gap and is helping sophisticated marketers like Dish Network drive a 60% increase in conversion rates and 15x lift in conversions."
"Invoca made a huge leap by applying AI to sales calls. Marketers now discover the 'purchase intent' of consumers similar to how valuable it is knowing the terms a lead has typed into a Google search," said Mark Suster, managing partner at Upfront Ventures. "With computers in every customer's pocket, calls have become an insanely important marketing channel for every brand."
Invoca plans to use the funding to accelerate the development of its award-winning products and broaden its ecosystem of partners in digital advertising, marketing technology, CRM, and affiliate marketing. Earlier this month, Invoca released Signal Discovery, which uses a proprietary unsupervised machine learning model to analyze buying conversations between consumers and experts in the contact center. This helps marketers understand, in real time, the factors affecting consumers' intent to buy, like competitive promotional campaigns. Marketers can apply these insights to drive more revenue-generating calls, boost conversion rates, and improve the buying experience.
"We're coming into an era where technology is being used to enable and improve human connections, instead of replacing them," said Scott Hilleboe, managing director at H.I.G. Growth Partners. "Invoca is at the forefront of this shift, giving marketers the tools to uncover and act on conversational insights in a way that is simple and scalable, similar to what they've been doing on the digital side for years. Given H.I.G.'s extensive investment experience in digital media, analytics, and call centers, we quickly recognized the incredible power and value of Invoca's technology. We are truly excited to co-lead this round and usher Invoca into its next phase of growth, building on its already impressive business momentum and customer-first culture."
About Invoca
Invoca is an AI-powered call tracking and conversational analytics company that brings the depth of marketing analytics traditionally limited to digital consumer interactions to the world of human-to-human selling. With Invoca, marketers can use real-time call and conversational analytics to maximize the return of their paid media campaigns in Google and Facebook, and improve the buying experience by enriching customer profiles in Salesforce and Adobe Experience Cloud. With Fortune 500 customers and deep partnerships with the technologies marketers use every day, Invoca has raised $116M from leading venture capitalists including Accel, Upfront Ventures, H.I.G. Growth Partners, Morgan Stanley, and Salesforce Ventures. For more information, visit www.invoca.com.
About Upfront Ventures
Los Angeles-based Upfront Ventures has invested nationally since 1996 in the most innovative early-stage tech companies and founders. Notable investments include Bird, GOAT, Kyriba, Apeel Sciences, Ring (acquired by Amazon) and Maker Studios (acquired by Disney). For more information: upfront.com.
About H.I.G. Growth Partners
H.I.G. Growth Partners is the dedicated growth capital investment affiliate of H.I.G. Capital, a leading global private equity investment firm with more than $34 billion of equity capital under management.* We seek to make both majority and minority investments in growing, technology-oriented businesses capable of causing significant disruption within their markets throughout North America, Europe and Latin America. We invest in businesses across a wide range of industries, but focus on verticals where H.I.G. Growth Partners has significant experience including: SAAS, Cloud & Data Software, Technology-Enabled Services, Internet and Digital Marketing Services, Consumer / e-Commerce and Healthcare. We work closely with our companies as value-add partners providing the business with the benefit of our deep operational, digital and technology experience together with H.I.G. Capital's vast international resources and relationships during the development and implementation of transformational digital and technology centric strategies to drive superior performance. For more information, visit www.HIGgrowth.com.
* Based on total capital commitments managed by H.I.G. Capital and affiliates.
SOURCE Invoca
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