SAN FRANCISCO — Rasa, developer of a generative conversational AI platform, has completed a $30 million Series C funding round, co-led by StepStone Group and PayPal Ventures, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Accel, and Basis Set Ventures.
“This investment accelerates our lead in the market, and fuels our drive to redefine what is possible for businesses using generative AI-powered chat and voice platforms at scale,” said Melissa Gordon, Rasa CEO. “With our technology, we’re well-positioned to transform how businesses interact with their customers, making every conversation impactful and personal. We will use the funding to advance our technological leadership and strengthen our market presence.”
Dr. Alan Nichol, Rasa Co-Founder and CTO, added, “At Rasa we’ve reinvented how conversational AI works. While many in the industry claim to incorporate generative AI, often it’s merely an addition of LLMs onto their existing platforms.”
Rasa continues to deliver on its mission to empower the world’s largest brands to address people’s needs with open and extensible conversational AI. Rasa powers sophisticated and robust AI assistants aligned with customers’ business logic that provide meaningful and practical user engagement. The recent launches of Rasa Pro and Rasa Studio with CALM (Conversational AI with Language Models) deliver a major innovation that combines the flexibility, nuanced understanding, and fast time-to-value of Large Language Models (LLMs) with the control and certainty of traditional (NLU-based) chatbots. With out-of-the-box conversation handling, CALM ensures user interactions remain coherent and natural. Rasa Studio adds an intuitive UI that’s built from the ground up for CALM, saving significant development time and reducing costs by reducing the reliance on specialist teams.
“We believe Rasa delivers unparalleled value to its clients by automating or eliminating the most expensive and time-consuming aspects of delivering excellent customer service,” said Hunter Somerville, Partner at StepStone Group. “Rasa has proven time and again that security-conscious enterprise customers can safely deploy the latest conversational AI, with an elegant low-code platform that offers robust functionality, data privacy, and scale.”
PayPal Ventures joins this round as the venture firm’s first AI investment, marking the launch of its new AI Fund to invest in early stage AI startups across all industries and verticals. “We are thrilled to mark the launch of our AI Fund with our investment in Rasa,” said Alan Du, PayPal Ventures partner. “We believe Rasa offers a best-in-class platform for enterprises to develop robust, conversational AI, and we have seen how its concierge solutions improve customer engagement and business performance.”
Rasa powers two of the world’s three top banks, major insurers, and global travel and hospitality companies, among others. Rasa has been downloaded more than 50 million times by developers.
“Rasa’s latest platform marks a revolutionary advancement in the realm of conversational AI. It effortlessly combines ease of use with advanced capabilities and will enable us to securely leverage the potential of Large Language Models to create an even more intuitive conversational experience for our customers,” remarked Andreas Bohmann, VP IT Enterprise and Integration Architecture at Deutsche Telekom.
The new funding will also allow Rasa to continue growing its team, which is dedicated to reshaping the future of AI assistants. Rasa is currently hiring several exciting roles across North America and Europe in Marketing, Sales, Engineering, Customer Success, and more.
