Crescendo – the next episode!

When we announced Crescendo publicly in January of this year, we were a newborn with big ambitions. Our team came from world class multi-disciplinary backgrounds, covering the AI, contact center software and BPO sectors. Our unique value proposition was offering a vertically integrated Contact Center BPO service with outcome-driven pricing. That proposition was driven by our insight that AI offered a unique ‘why now’ moment to address the 20-year misalignment in the contact center industry.

We described our immediate product focus then – 

… the goal is to build an AI-layer which creates playbooks that deliver automated resolution paths for repetitive contact center use cases as well as insights into how operations and customer satisfaction can be improved. We will prioritize 1-2 key verticals, and have already begun deploying our technology with early design partners. Our expectation: 10x+ productivity gains for contact center operators, while delivering a truly conversational experience for customers, all without long wait times. If done thoughtfully and in alignment with our Responsible AI manifesto, we believe this could be one of the most meaningful technology innovations directly introduced into contact centers in over two decades.

Cut to the present – the Crescendo platform is live and delivers real outcomes for customers. We have focused on key unregulated sectors, mindful that regulated sectors could slow down fast adoption and iterative engagement in the early days. In an industry where the deployment cycles are usually measured in quarters, if not years, Crescendo customers can go live in a matter of weeks.

Our ideal customer profile is clear: fast moving, digitally native enterprise customers who are experiencing growth and are keen to engage directly with their customers. We provide the AI, pre-integrated software modules as well as humans in the loop to automate both frontline customer experience and back office CC operations. We track each interaction, score it, report back on any incidents and observations to learn from, coach both AI and human agents and use the KPI (Eg. CSAT) to ensure that we helped drive the right outcomes. Best of all, we only get paid on the outcomes we deliver – a departure from the multi-decade policy of charging for labor, something that misaligns contact center BPOs and their enterprise customers.

The contact center industry suffers from 50% annual staff churn because much of the work is tedious and repetitive. AI performs those tasks much faster and often better than humans. By shifting most of that work to AI, employees are freed up to handle as many as 10X more clients while delivering a better customer experience and at the same time they are helping AI learn and become more valuable. We expect that these new AI-augmented jobs will attract and retain a higher quality workforce and give current employees in the industry a path forward to better, more meaningful jobs.

Early customer feedback has been exhilarating – we are glad to support our partners in elevating their levels of customer support. Gone are the days when enterprises would hide the ways to reach them directly in their websites. Now they are using it as a differentiator to attract new customers on the basis of excellent quality of service.

One of our early customers, RIO (an ambitious consumer electronics company) experienced 90% containment rate (ie. the answer was provided directly to the customer) for pre-sales queries within weeks of going live as well as 60% containment rate for post sales queries.

Similarly, another events management company WebConnex went live within 7 days of purchasing Crescendo. Many other customers across technology, retail and fintech are live on the Crescendo platform. Judging by their delight, our approach seems to resonate with them and is aligned with their goals.

Today – we are delighted to take this to the next level by acquiring PartnerHero, a leading customer operations outsourcing provider. Shervin Talieh and his team have built a terrific business as a labor of love, and this shows in their deep and trusted customer relationships and unique team culture. With this move, we welcome Shervin, Ryan, Steve, Darnell, Amy, Tracy, as well as their terrific engineers, CX transformation leads, and associates to the fold.

The combined company is EBITDA positive with over $50 million in ARR. We are confident of achieving over $100M in ARR by H1 2025. We are excited to welcome and help transform the CX experience of 200+ customers who are keen on bringing the benefits of Generative AI to their end consumers. We will lead with autonomous agents and a software-driven approach to automating the operations, but also have the dedication of human agents in the loop whose roles we have re-imagined to complement world class AI.

On the back of organic revenue growth, as well as joining forces with PartnerHero, the company also announces today the completion of our Series C raise. After this round of financing, the company is valued at $500 million. We are grateful to our partners General Catalyst (their CEO Managing Director Hemant Taneja is someone we consider a Co-Founder; we are delighted to announce that Hemant is joining Andy and Anand on our Board of Directors) and Alorica for their continued support. We also welcome our new investors Celesta Capital to the fold. In total, we have raised $50 million in financing to date to complete the PartnerHero acquisition and finance our continued growth.

We may be only eight-months old, but we’ve been driven by values since Day 1. We have publicly shared our commitment to Responsible AI. Our engineering and operations teams are deeply committed to eliminating headline risk for our customers as well as preserving the privacy and integrity of their data.

As we build an enduring business, we take inspiration from multidisciplinary efforts in other industries such as Livongo. Prior to their pioneering approach in healthcare, which combined healthcare executives, doctors and software engineers, Silicon Valley would talk about “disrupting” healthcare vs. respecting the decades of institution building and care delivery that had come before. The word “legacy” was considered a bad thing in Silicon Valley, something to be simply disrupted away. Like Livongo did in healthcare, we see “legacy” as something to respect and learn from, while also taking things boldly forward from first principles and aided by AI. We lean on our multidisciplinary team to help us solve challenges across a swath of industries for our customers. For us, our customers’ and industry’s “legacy” is something to honor and carry into the future.

If you are an existing customer of Crescendo (+ PartnerHero) – please look out for an exciting series of live events in SF and NY where you can meet the world class team and learn about the product roadmap we have planned for you. Invites will follow soon.

We are aware of the enormity of the opportunity to transform the $741 billion CX labor industry through AI. It’s time to get back to work!

— Anand Chandrasekaran, Andy Lee, Matt Price, Slava Zhakov