We Just Raised our $10.5M Series A—Next Stop, Replacing Intent-Based Solutions with Adaptive Communications

When Uri Valevski, Rom Cohen and I began our journey founding Hyro in 2018, we were fascinated with the idea that humans can communicate with technology via natural language (voice assistants and chatbots), but at the same time disappointed with the over-simplistic, rigid  experiences that were nothing like the natural language communication we’d imagined.

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Businesses struggled to provide quality chat and voice solutions, and their customers noticed. To be blunt—chatbots were everywhere, and they sucked.

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The technology didn’t live up to the demand, or the hype. Low understanding rates, high cost and time to develop, as well as an inability to scale across different use cases were some of the biggest lingering issues that caused customer headaches.

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We knew that with a new approach, centered around flexibility, we could cut through the noise and hit the reset button on intent-based chatbots, voice assistants and IVRs.

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Fast forward a few years, and 2020-2021 revealed what we’d already suspected; enterprise communications suffer under unexpected change. Big ships are increasingly difficult to steer, and in the wake of a pandemic, it became near-impossible to keep up with the intense shift in choices, conditions and demands of the modern-day customer. Content, data and information were constantly changing, and intent-based conversational AI couldn’t keep up as most updates still had to happen manually.

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Take COVID-19 as a key example—questions originally centered around travel restrictions, then symptoms, then quarantine protocols, then antibodies and have now moved on to vaccinations. Adjusting web-based, SMS and call center interfaces to reflect all of that new information was a time-consuming, costly and often impossible challenge.

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So, on the heels of a pandemic that taught us the importance of adaptability, we’re launching the world’s first Adaptive Communications Platform—and we’ve raised a 10.5M Series A to push us forward, led by Spero Ventures, and with participation from the leading cloud communications platform Twilio Inc., Mindset Ventures and R-squared ventures. Our existing investors, Hanaco Ventures, Spider Capital and Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, are all participating as well.

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We plan to use the new funding to accelerate the adoption of our Adaptive Communications Platform as the go-to solution for organizations looking to meet customers and employees in any conversational setting without expending heavy business resources. The investment from and partnership with Twilio echoes our common goals, which include flexibility and scale for our respective customers across all communication channels. We’re also planning to hire top talent in our California, New York and Israel offices, doubling the size of our ‘SuperHyro’ team. 

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By emphasizing a language-based approach, including knowledge graph and natural language automation, we’re enabling enterprises to easily streamline processes and messaging across their most valuable platforms, services and channels, ensuring that all their key comms are ready for anything.

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Being adaptive doesn’t just mean being able to change consistently; it means being able to thrive through change. For the past 20 years, enterprises have embraced digital transformation. We’re now in the age of the adaptive enterprise, in which digital channels and communications need to rapidly adjust to the language, medium and preferences of the customer, wherever they are. Excuse the Darwinism here, but it’s truly become “adapt or die”.

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So what does that mean on a practical level?

• Speed – using knowledge graphs to automatically ingest information and computational linguistics methods to query it without relying heavily on Machine Learning.

• Simplicity – providing conversational AI interfaces in a plug & play manner without taxing efforts on the customer end.

• Scalability – adding new use-cases and updating existing ones automatically.