Passage AI, a pioneer in AI-powered conversational interfaces, today announced a $7.3 million Series A round of financing, led by Blumberg Capital. Founded in 2016 by three Silicon Valley veterans with an extensive background in deep learning and artificial intelligence, Passage AI is at the forefront of bringing AI-powered conversational interfaces into the retail, telecommunications, automotive and education industries. The latest investment brings Passage AI's total funding to $10.3 million and will help the company aggressively expand into these industries and international markets. Bruce Taragin, managing director at Blumberg Capital, will join Passage AI's Board of Directors.

"Passage AI's offering is well-timed with the rapidly increasing demand for AI-driven solutions that reduce costs, improve employee engagement and deliver superior customer service," said Taragin. "The market demand has resulted in Passage AI being one of the fastest growing early-stage SaaS companies we've ever seen. Additionally, the accuracy and ease of use of Passage AI has captured attention -- and dollars -- from blue chip G2000 companies. We are excited to work with Passage AI to fuel continued growth in the conversational AI sector."

Companies from all industries are evaluating how to improve their business operations through the use of AI technologies. Research and Markets estimates the virtual digital assistant market will exceed $15 billion by 2021. With Passage AI, companies can address a variety of use cases, automating routine and often mundane tasks and providing instantaneous responses to common questions. Passage AI's award-winning conversational AI platform has demonstrated 95 percent or higher accuracy in field tests. The company was named a 2018 TiE50 award winner, surpassed $1 million in ARR and counts some of the largest companies in the world as its customers.

"This partnership with Blumberg Capital means we can continue to accelerate our goal of becoming the leader in conversational AI," said Ravi N. Raj, CEO and co-founder of Passage AI. "We are focused on bringing highly useful, accurate and easy-to-deploy chatbots to organizations everywhere. With this additional funding, we can continue hiring talented employees and rapidly growing our customer base both in the U.S. and internationally."

Passage AI has created a bot-building tool that utilizes AI and natural language processing technologies, requires no coding and can be deployed anywhere in as little as two weeks. Its sophisticated deep learning model enables Passage AI bots to more readily understand a user, regardless of how they express themselves. Passage AI understands natural language text and speech, creating an intelligent conversational interface capable of better identifying intents, extracting the most useful, pertinent and timely information, understanding and responding to queries and searching through vast amounts of data.

About Blumberg Capital
Blumberg Capital is an early-stage venture capital firm that partners with passionate entrepreneurs to innovate and build successful technology companies. The firm specializes in leading Seed and Series A rounds collaborating with angel investors, other venture capital firms and strategic partners. The Blumberg Capital team are active investors and board members - operating as an extension of the entrepreneurs' network. Blumberg Capital is headquartered in San Francisco with team members in Tel Aviv and New York. For more information, please visit blumbergcapital.com.

About Passage AI
Founded in 2016 by Walmart Labs alumni Madhu Mathihalli and Ravi Raj and LinkedIn alumnus Mitul Tiwari, Passage AI enables businesses to harness the power of AI-enabled conversational interfaces to bring bottom-line benefits, to better utilize service agents saddled by mundane tasks, and to deliver exceptional customer experience. Passage AI counts Kohl's, Udacity and PwC among the business and services that use its solution. A 2018 TiE50 award winner, the company has secured $10.3 million in total funding and is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif. More information can be found at http://www.passage.ai.