nocall, which uses generative AI to take over corporate telephone work, announced on 11th September that it had secured around ¥800m ($5m) in a series A funding round.
The company was founded in 2020 and is headquartered in Tokyo.
A track record that includes a sharp drop in same-day cancellations for used-car valuations
nocall launched a service called nocall.ai at the end of 2023. It uses AI-generated speech to take over the work of telephoning customers to confirm arrangements and the like.
MOTA, which provides used-car valuation and purchase services, uses nocall.ai for the reminder calls it places to customers three days before and the day before a booked valuation. According to nocall, MOTA’s same-day cancellation rate has improved from around 15% to 5.7%, and the firm claims the service is preventing lost opportunities worth some ¥750,000 ($4,900) a day.
American readers will be aware that generative AI is already taking over telephone work in industries such as logistics. In Japan, however, the use of AI in this field is still at an early stage. nocall attributes this to “the technical difficulty of holding a natural conversation, including the back-channel responses and pauses particular to Japanese, as well as meeting the high standards of service that companies demand”.
As set out below, nocall lists product development among the uses for the money it has just raised, which suggests that although it has achieved a degree of success, there is still room for improvement.
Three VCs took part in the series A
The series A was led by JAFCO and Archetype Ventures, both venture-capital (VC) firms. Coreline Ventures, another VC and an existing investor, also took part.
The money will be used for product development and to step up hiring.
Shogo Hayashi, nocall’s chief executive, commented:
“Two historically large waves are bearing down on us at once. The first is the shrinking working-age population. The second is the arrival of generative AI. And we are right in the middle of them.”
“The gap between the supply of and the demand for workers will only widen from here. We are taking on this problem, for which there have been few solutions, with generative-AI technology.”
