Marc Bernstein, Balto CEO
St. Louis call center support platform Balto just closed a $37.5 million Series B round led by Stripes and joined by RingCentral Ventures. The 4thEst8 talked with CEO Marc Bernstein early this morning to find out how he plans to use the money.
“It’s both product and go-to-market,” Bernstein said. “Deepening our real-time product advantage and taking our real-time guidance platform to market.”
Bernstein later posted on LinkedIn that multi-language support, recommendations that write themselves and other features were coming in 2022. As for marketing, the startup put up an offer for free Bose headphones to prospects who demo their software. They’ve also apparently cut some kind of deal with influencers, evidenced by this podcasters post.
Balto’s software uses AI to help call-center agents. It monitors their phone conversations with customers, and pops useful and pertinent information up on the screen so the agent can more quickly address the problem at hand.
The 4thEst8 has recently been all over this aggressively growing startup, breaking news of it’s move from colocated workspace T-Rex to it’s own offices in a story two weeks ago, quickly followed with a story about a suite of new software features to support call center supervisors and trainers. This year the company doubled its workforce to more than 110 employees.
This morning’s $37.5M ‘Series B’ was led by Stripes and joined by RingCentral Ventures.
In Oct. 2020 their $10M ‘Series A’ round was led by Sierra Ventures with Jump Capital, OCA Ventures, Cultivation Capital and others participating. Balto previously raised $4.2M in a pair of seed rounds, plus $50K from the Arch Grant in 2018.
Links:
On the 4thEst8:
EXCLUSIVE: Fast growing startup gets new digs
Series A fuels Balto hiring spree
This story was updated on 8/20 to add the information on the Bose offer and Bernsteins projections for product improvements in 2022.
