Highlights:

  • Palona AI claims its technology enables brands to create tailored AI sales agents that can upsell products and offer personalized recommendations to customers.
  • Sources say Palona AI’s chatbots encourage greater user engagement, with some users even asking questions they would hesitate to ask a human agent.

Three artificial intelligence engineers, formerly leading projects at Google, Meta, and Samsung, have announced raising money for a new startup focused on creating AI-powered customer sales chatbots that are more reliable and emotionally intelligent.

Officially registered as Proactive AI Lab Inc., Palona AI, raised USD 10 million in its recent funding round that was led by UpHonest Capital, with additional support from Fusion Fund, NEO Investment Partners, Maynard Webb, and other angel investors.

The funding round aligns with the official launch of its sales models, which are already being utilized by clients like home security camera manufacturer Wyze Labs Inc. and wellness studio Mindzero Inc.

Customer service chatbots have surged in popularity with the advent of large language models powering tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Brands are using these chatbots to lighten the workload of customer service teams by managing straightforward queries before escalating complex issues to human agents. Additionally, chatbots assist consumers in discovering new products and services, and in some cases, have even become an alternative to Google Search for browsing the internet.

Despite the excitement surrounding AI chatbots, their adoption hasn’t been without challenges. Some users have found ways to manipulate chatbots into making controversial or inappropriate statements, while in other instances, chatbots have independently veered off course, even suggesting competitors’ products.

Brands must address these challenges to rely more effectively on AI chatbots, and Palona AI believes it has the solution. By partnering with OpenAI, it utilizes its large language models as a foundation while integrating its supervisory model on top. This added layer ensures chatbots remain focused, adhere to the brand’s identity, and fulfill their intended tasks seamlessly.

Palona AI claims its technology enables brands to create customized AI sales agents that can upsell products and offer personalized recommendations to customers. The company collaborates with consumer brands to integrate proprietary data, such as employee training manuals, FAQs, product inventories, and marketing materials, to fine-tune its models. This approach, the startup says, makes its AI agents far more effective at representing brands and aligning with their objectives.

Palona AI is headed by Co-founder and CEO Maria Zhang, who formerly served as Vice President of Engineering at Google and Vice President and General Manager of the AI for Products group at Meta.

According to Zhang, one of Palona AI’s key strengths is its chatbots’ ability to foster greater user engagement, even to the extent that some users feel comfortable asking questions they might hesitate to pose to a human agent.

She also mentioned that the company’s goal is to “breathe life into brands” and provide each customer with a friendly, personalized experience.

“Building relationships with customers requires a precise mix of human skills that even the best salespeople train for years to achieve. We captured that skillset and turned it into models and actions our AI Agents can consistently perform,” Zhang said.

Zhang’s Co-founders include Chief Technology Officer Tim Howes, a former leader of Meta’s AI infrastructure team, and Chief Scientist Steve Liu, who previously held a similar position at Samsung.