Estimated 1.6 billion U.S. dollars to AI Afiniti seeking IPO listing
We reported on AI's unicorn company earlier this year. There are reports that the latest AI unicorns in the tech world will be listed as early as this year. The protagonist of the story is called Afiniti. Artificial intelligence startup Afiniti primarily uses artificial intelligence technology to help businesses more efficiently match telemarketing center employees and customers, and their valuation has reached $1.6 billion.
According to VentureBeat, the start-up company in Washington DC, USA, was established in 2009 and completed an 80 million dollar financing in April, becoming another unicorn in the AI ​​field. This round of investors includes GAM, McKinsey, the Resource Group and G3 investments, as well as Elizabeth Murdoch, Founder and former Chairman of Shine Group, a private investor, and Ivan Seidenfeld, former executive director of Verizon, and others. A former Verizon executive director, Larry Babbio.
After completing this round of financing, Afiniti’s total financing has reached US$ 167 million. The company had previously completed financing of 87.2 million U.S. dollars, including 30 million U.S. dollars of D round of financing in May 2016. Afiniti, with a valuation of US$1.6 billion, ranks 78th among CB Insight’s global unicorn club with a total value of US$662 billion.
VentureBeat reported that Afiniti had secretly submitted an IPO application in the second half of 2016, but we are currently unable to find any proof. The company itself maintains a relatively mysterious attitude. They mainly provide artificial intelligence services for customer service management, including telephone sales and customer service centers. For example, a company called Chorus.ai is mainly responsible for transcription and analysis of sales calls and conferences. They use natural language processing for this AI technology to refine the most important information.
Match the most suitable employee for the customer
Afiniti mainly uses big data and machine learning to match customers and company agents. Methodology: According to VentureBeat, Afiniti compares the caller’s phone number with up to 100 databases and then analyzes the data information, including consumer records, revenue, credit scores, social media profiles, and even the population related to the location of callers. Census data. Remember when we introduced AI and emotional intelligence? Afiniti is using this technology. They are identifying customers through emotional characteristics.
Afiniti will then review the information of call center employees to find the employees who are most effective at handling this customer. Afiniti handles this process through a registration technology called Enterprise Behavioral Pairing, which currently processes 400,000 calls per day, constantly optimizing their algorithms and improving the effectiveness of matching. The results of each call will be analyzed and cycled in the Enterprise Behavioral Pairing to improve the next performance. Afiniti claims to have obtained 42 patents while 60 are pending.
Conspiracy theorists who believe that this violates data privacy may be weeping, but this is the beautiful new world in which we live. When you consider politicians, Afiniti's board members may further exacerbate your paranoia, including former Spanish President José Maria Aznar; former US Treasury Secretary John Snow; New Hampshire’s former United States Senator John E. Sununu and former Australian politician Wyatt Roy. Leading the company is Zia Chishti, founder and former executive director of Align Technology, a $9 billion medical device technology company.
Afiniti said that its customers’ average revenue has grown by more than 4%, including T-Mobile, Caesars Entertainment, Sprint, Virgin Media and Vodafone. Afiniti said that its AI platform brings an additional $70 million in annual revenue for T-Mobile, with a 5% increase in user retention and a 2% reduction in employees' time to handle the phone. Today, T-Mobile ranks first in the list of JD Power Wireless Customer Care; as for Caesars Entertainment, its sales have increased by 6.5% since the use of their technology in 2011, and the number of reservations has increased by 30,000.
Listing
Rumors about IPO filings first appeared in January of this year, when Bloomberg reported that Afiniti is considering going public to boost growth. Bloomberg quoted sources as saying that Afiniti may sell 20%-30% of its shares in exchange for a $2 billion valuation. This news was earlier than VentureBeat's latest round of funding for Afiniti. According to Bloomberg News, Afiniti may become one of the largest enterprise software IPOs in recent years. According to Bloomberg, the field of artificial intelligence has raised about $4.1 billion in investment over the past three years. Prior to this, the largest enterprise software IPO was Inovalon. The cloud big data analytics company primarily serves the healthcare industry, with a valuation of 1.73 billion U.S. dollars at the time of its listing. However, since its listing in February 2015, its share price has dropped by about 60%.
At the same time, sources quoted by VentureBeat stated that Afiniti is still not profitable this year, at least until the 2018 fiscal year. Anonymous sources told VentureBeat that Afiniti’s revenue “grew at 100%.†We are not sure what this means but the business model of Afiniti shows:
So basically, Afiniti is so convinced of its value proposition that they are willing to divide into dollars saved for each customer. Afiniti stated that its technology can bring the following benefits to customers:
Afiniti's AI platform
If the company’s AI platform works just as well (as many large corporate customers believe it does), Afiniti is indeed an exciting AI company. In the future, there will be different kinds of companies using their services, such as dating websites and human resources websites. Afiniti’s executive director, Zia Chistye, hinted that his Enterprise Behavioral Pairing platform can be used for other sales scenarios, such as facial recognition software to identify consumers entering the store, and then arrange suitable employees for them. Provide services.
Of course, there is the problem of homogeneity. We will only associate with people of similar background in the same interpersonal bubble. In addition, Afiniti may not be listed this year, or will never be listed. We have already seen Google, Apple, or some other tech giants “engulfing†startups before they are listed. Or they will take an unusual path and become the next Nvidia (whose market value has exceeded $55 billion, and the share price has risen by 158% in the past 12 months, partly because they are focused on AI hardware).
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