ST. LOUIS, Aug. 19, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Balto, the #1 Real-Time Guidance Platform for contact centers, has announced the completion of a $37.5 million Series B funding round. The funding is led by Stripes and joined by RingCentral Ventures.
Existing investors that participated include Sierra Ventures, TIA Ventures, OCA Ventures, Stage Venture Partners, SaaS Venture Capital, Sandalphon Capital, Cultivation Capital, Jump Capital, and Atreides Management. Riadh Dridi, Stripes Operating Partner and CMO at Automation Anywhere, joins Balto’s board.
The funding comes on the heels of Balto’s two latest product releases and as Balto’s Real-Time Platform surpasses 75 million guided calls and 160 million Real-Time Recommendations. It brings Balto’s total funding to $52 million.
“Balto is creating a mindset shift that is something you only see with category-defining products,” said CEO Marc Bernstein. “We’re moving contact centers from conversation intelligence, which is a great starting point, to conversation excellence. That’s what we’re all shooting for.”
From “What’s the Best Thing to Say?” to “Scale the Best Things to Say”
In the past, contact centers have had to deal with an execution gap between knowing what’s going wrong on calls and actually fixing it. Most solutions danced around this issue without ever solving it: Speech analytics, more coaching, staffing up QA, sticky notes, or whisper mode. These solutions could only tell you what was wrong on calls, or offer solutions after the call was already long gone.
With this round of funding, Balto is doubling down on closing the execution gap by providing contact centers with a way to improve conversations as they’re happening. Specifically, Balto is planning to make leaps in closed-loop reporting, allowing organizations to not only tie agent behavior to call outcomes but also scale top-performing behavior to the entire organization.
“Balto is the only company on earth that offers a closed loop of sourcing the best thing to say on a call and recommending that to a massive amount of people at scale in real time, all while giving insight – in real-time – into what exactly is working and what is not,” said Bernstein. “In the next year, we’re going to be looking at two things: improving Balto’s ability to surface insights so users can implement changes at the push of a button, and improving our fully automated loop.”
“For decades, organizations have struggled to utilize customer insights in order to make customer facing agents more effective. Balto’s Real-Time Guidance solves this problem elegantly by empowering organizations to turn these insights into real-time actions,” said Riadh Dridi, Operating Partner at Stripes. “The addressable market for Balto is massive and I’m thrilled to be joining their board of directors as the company enters its next stage of hypergrowth.”
Since its launch in 2017, Balto has provided over 160 million Real-Time Recommendations across dozens of enterprise customers, including AmTrust Financial, Katapult, Advantage Communications, and National General Insurance. Teams using Balto have seen statistically significant results, including 26% increases in conversion rates, 25% increases in CSAT scores, and 75% faster ramp times for new agents.
“I’m excited to take Real-Time from where we started it, where organizations accept it as a benefit to their teams, to organizations accepting it as the new standard for contact centers,” said Bernstein.