Kore.ai, a conversational artificial intelligence software company, raised $50 million in Series C funding led by Vistara Growth and PNC, with additional participation from NextEquity Partners, Nicola Wealth and Beedie Capital. Kore.ai also secured an additional $20 million credit facility from Sterling National Bank, bringing the total funding to $70 million.

As a part of the Series C round, Randy Garg, managing partner of Vistara Growth, and Daniel Pavlick, executive vice president of PNC, joined Kore.ai’s board of directors.

Kore.ai plans to use a significant amount of the funds to scale efforts in experience optimization (XO), optimizing enterprise customer, agent and employee experiences through AI-native platforms and products.

Through this funding, Kore.ai will continue broadening its XO performance in the conversational AI platform (CAIP) market, which is growing at 75% annually, according to Gartner. Kore.ai has been growing more than 100% per year over the last few years. Kore.ai has delivered experiences for more than 100 million enterprise consumers and 500,000 employees, resulting in more than $500 million in cost savings while improving CSAT by 20% to 30%, according to the company.

The company recently launched SmartAssist, an AI-native end-to-end contact center as-a-service (CCaaS) solution, as well as BankAssist, an omnichannel conversational virtual assistant that automates the most common retail banking customer needs.

“As customer expectations continue to rise, they increasingly expect the type of world-class experience that our customers deliver using our best-of-breed conversational AI based XO platform,” Raj Koneru, founder and CEO of Kore.ai, said. “We are absolutely thrilled to have such strong financial and strategic partners as investors who can help guide us as we continue to grow exponentially in the market by enabling our customers to deliver extraordinary conversational AI experiences which result in extraordinary outcomes.”

“As conversational AI technology continues to raise the bar on customer experiences via both voice and digital channels, Kore.ai remains at the forefront of innovation,” Garg said. “The company has established itself as a clear market leader as recognized by its customers and industry analysts in this rapidly growing space, and recent innovations such as its easy to implement no code solutions ensure it will remain so for the foreseeable future.”