A year after catching the eye of American Express, Israeli startup voca.ai has caught the attention of another market giant, Snap, which plans to acquire the company for $70 million. The whole Voca team will join Snap - according to a CTech report from this morning (Wednesday).  

You won’t even know you’re talking to a bot

Voca.ai was founded in 2017 by Einav Itamar, founder of Corrigon, which was acquired by eBay; and Dr. Alan Bekker. The company develops a system for voice AI virtual agents, where the customer won’t even realize they’re talking to a bot. The company explains that the virtual agent can adjust features like voice, language, accent, and even tone, to better fit the customer’s attitude. By utilizing this technology call centers can optimize operations, and allow the human agents to handle the more complex queries, resulting in low wait times.

The company explained to Geektime that its system learns the customer-agent interaction history, and better adapt for future calls. The system is not targeted for end-users, but rather more for enterprises with call centers. In 2019, Voca.ai completed a $3.5 million funding round that was led by American Express, Lool Ventures, and Flint. The startup has only raised $6 million to date, which means that investors made a pretty penny on the sale.

This is not Snapchat’s first Israeli acquisition. In 2016, Snap acquired Cimagine for $30 million, which led Snap to establish an R&D center in Israel. Cimagine developed an AR engine, where users can see in real-time through their smartphones how a product will look in a space they want to furnish.