Conversica expands channels, markets with Intelligens acquisition

AI conversational firm Conversica is today expanding its channels and its market with the acquisition of Santiago, Chile-based Intelligens.ai.

Through this purchase, the company will add support for Messenger, Facebook, Slack and Skype to its current email and SMS channels, Conversica CEO Alex Terry told me.

Conversica offers an AI Sales Agent that employs intelligent textual conversation to prequalify potential leads and then hand them off to human reps. Here’s a typical interaction, with Conversica’s Agent leading off:

While other providers’ intelligent virtual agents also assist sales through customer service, Terry said his company’s was the only one focused only on B2C and B2B sales and marketing.

The Conversica platform is integrated with over 50 different marketing tools, primarily customer relationship management (CRM) systems like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics or marketing automation platforms like Marketo or Pardot.

Terry added that his company, which currently has over a thousand customers in 13 countries, will focus this year on international markets. With the Intelligens.ai acquisition, he said, the Foster City, California-based Conversica will add its first office outside the US. Founded last year, Intelligens has about 40 customers in Chile, Peru, Columbia and Bolivia.

There’s “a really strong tech scene in Santiago,” Terry said, where “there are very good developers at a reasonable price.” The Intelligens team will remain in their current Santiago office.

The purchase, for which deal terms were not made public, also boosts the platform’s existing Spanish-language capability. In addition to English and Spanish, Conversica supports French, German and Japanese.

Intelligens’ tech will be integrated into Conversica, Terry said, although “it’s not decided yet” whether the acquisition’s brand name will be retained.

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About The Author

Barry Levine

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.