INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Cogito announced a $37 million Series C investment today led by Goldman Sachs Growth Equity
Previous investors Salesforce Ventures and OpenView also chipped in.Mark Midle of Goldman Sachs& Merchant Banking Division, has joined
Cogito Board of DirectorsThe company has raised over $64 million since it emerged from the MIT Human Dynamics Lab back in 2007 trying to use
the artificial intelligence technology available at the time to understand sentiment and apply it in a business context.While it took some
time for the technology to catch up with the vision, and find the right use case, company CEO and founder Joshua Feast says today they are
helping customer service representatives understand the sentiment and emotional context of the person on the line and give them behavioral
cues on how to proceed.&We sell software to very large software, premium brands with many thousands of people in contact centers
The purpose of our solution is to help provide a really wonderful service experience in moments of truth,& he explained
Anyone who deals with a large company customer service has likely felt there is sometimes a disconnect between the person on the phone and
their ability to understand your predicament and solve your problem.Cogito in action giving customer service reps real-time feedback.He says
using his company solution, which analyzes the contents of the call in real time, and provides relevant feedback, the goal is to not just
complete the service call, but to leave the customer feeling good about the brand and the experience
Certainly a bad experience can have the opposite effect.He wants to use technology to make the experience a more human interaction and he
recognizes that as an organization grows, layers of business process make it harder for the customer service representative to convey that
Feast believes that technology has helped create this problem and it can help solve it too.While the company is not talking about valuation
or specific revenue at this point, Feast reports that revenue has grown 3X over the last year
Among their customers are Humana and Metlife, two large insurance companies, each with thousands of customer service agents.Cogito is based
in downtown Boston with 117 employees at last count, and of course they hope to use the money to add on to that number and help scale this
vision further.&This is about scaling our organization to meet client needs
It also about deepening what we do
In a lot of ways, we are only scratching the surface [of the underlying technology] in terms of how we can use AI to support emotional
connections and help organizations be more human,& Feast said.
