Philipp Heltewig, the former CIO of marketing firm Sitecore, had joined forces with Sascha Poggemann and Benjamin Mayr to form Cognigy, a startup that specializes in customer service automation. With AI becoming increasingly prevalent in the tech industry, Heltewig noticed a confusion about its capabilities among both consumers and high-level executives.
“Big tech companies have ‘mis-set’ expectations when it comes to AI,” Heltewig told TechCrunch. “In 2015, IBM was claiming that its Watson platform could do everything. In 2024, that’s coming back as ‘Copilot can do everything.’ Neither is true.”
The main focus of Cognigy was to create AI that could handle the repetitive and mundane tasks that customer service agents face on a daily basis. While AI for contact centers is not a new trend, with over half of businesses already investing in AI capabilities, Cognigy sets itself apart from other startups by offering a scalable platform that can be deployed locally or on the cloud, and can handle up to tens of thousands of customer conversations simultaneously.
One survey showed that the market for call center AI is set to grow from $1.6 billion in 2022 to $4.1 billion by 2027. However, aside from big tech companies, there are many startups, such as Parloa, Kore.ai, Lang, PolyAI, and Retell AI, that offer AI-powered products for automating basic tasks in call centers.
So what sets Cognigy apart from these companies?
- Firstly, Cognigy’s platform can be deployed locally or on the cloud, making it easily accessible for businesses of all sizes.
- Secondly, it is scalable and able to handle tens of thousands of customer conversations at once.
- And thirdly, Cognigy offers a unique approach by training its own generative AI models, as well as integrating models from third parties such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Aleph Alpha.
The vendor-agnostic and bring-your-own-model approach may be one of the reasons behind Cognigy’s rapid growth in recent years. The company currently has 175 customers and serves over 1,000 different brands, including big names like Toyota and Bosch. In fact, just this week, Cognigy announced a significant Series C funding round, led by French private equity group Eurazeo, with a total investment of $100 million (bringing the company’s total raised to $175 million).
With a workforce of 175 employees based in Düsseldorf and San Francisco, Cognigy plans to expand its geographic reach across the U.S. and invest in product R&D. By the end of the year, the company aims to grow its team to 250 members in order to advance their mission of enabling the creation of more sophisticated customer service solutions and accelerating the adoption of AI-first technologies that deliver a tangible return on investment.
