Interface.ai, an automaton platform for customers of banks and other financial institutions, announced today that it has closed a $30 million funding round led by Avataar Venture Partners.
20 million dollars of this round was equity, another $10 million in the form of debt. It is the first outside capital Interface ever took; the company has been completely bootstrapped till now.
More than 100 financial institutions across North America trust the interface, through which millions of interactions are processed every day. Currently, the company generates tens of millions in annual recurring revenue.
The inspiration for Interface was, according to Njay, his father's credit union in India. Before moving to Inovaware co-founder Bruce Kim in 2019, Njay had stints at Microsoft as a product manager working on the Bing advertising team and at EA as a senior product manager on mobile games.
"The big national banks are investing heavily in AI to transform their banking operations," Njay said. "But for many regional and community-based financial institutions, staffing and resourcing this capability is simply out of reach. Interface democratizes access to AI.".
The company's core product is a suite of voice and text-based AI agents that can be used to fulfill simple bank customer service requests. Equipped with models running on data exclusive to the house, the agents are capable of doing tasks such as assisting in the change of mortgage payments and opening new accounts.
Agents can be further fine-tuned on the internal data of banks. It can be configured with information such as content of previous chats that enables the agents to upsell products.
"Our AI is specifically designed for the banking industry, complete with pre-built integrations, data models and workflows," added Njay.
Financial institutions are, indeed deeply testing AI — and specifically generative AI — to deepen applications across customer service, predictive analytics, and far more. According to a March survey reported by American Banker, currently more than half of global and U.S. banks plan to deploy some level of generative AI within the next year.
Besides Interface, some AI startups that attempt to get their bite of banks' business also include Hyperplane that develops AI models for predicting customer behavior, Cambio that comes in to create AI for communicating with a bank's customers, and Digital Onboarding that focuses on strengthening the relationship of banks with the customers.
But banking customers are still anxious about the technology. One J.D. Power survey found that only 27% of respondents said they'd trust AI for financial information and advice, and less than half said they'd take product recommendations from AI.
Neither was that true in the case of institutions, which aren't using AI much for customer communications-a big piece of Interface's business. On the bright side, however, credit unions-one of Interface's biggest customer segments-have been very aggressively adopting chatbot tech this year.
Our platform has numerous levers for value creation," Njay said. "The number of distinct applications of AI is one of the significant factors that allows Interface to ride out headwinds."
Interface will use the new fund to add to its 120-person team across North America and India and "accelerate go-to-market initiatives.".