Two chatbot companies serving travel secure funding for expansion

Two chatbot companies operating in the travel sector have raised funding, with Inbenta landing $40 million and NLX scoring $4.6 million.

Led by Tritium Partners, Inbenta’s round will fund future product innovation and expansion into new markets.

Founded in 2011, Inbenta says it automates customer interactions with conversational artificial intelligence that has a 90% correct answer rate and operates in 35 languages. Dallas-based Inbenta has regional offices in the United States, Europe, Brazil and Japan.

More than 250 global brands use Inbenta’s solution across a range of industries, including travel, financial services, ecommerce, telecom and utilities, according to the company.

Melissa Solis, Inbenta’s new CEO, calls its AI a “game changer for any business that has to handle customer inquiries, whether simple questions or more complicated tasks.”

Solis adds that Inbenta’s proprietary natural language processing and neuro-symbolic AI technology set it apart.

“With the backing of Tritium Partners, Inbenta is now positioned to rapidly scale and develop a truly end-to-end AI platform that delivers on features never before imagined,” she says.

NLX, the other chatbot company that has announced funding, says it will use its Series Seed II funding to fuel its marketplace expansion and product optimization. The round was led by IAG Capital Partners with participation from JetBlue Ventures and Flying Fish Partners, among others.

NLX previously announced a $5 million raise in seed funding in January 2022, bringing the total raised to $9.6 million, according to the company. Founded in 2018, NLX is based in New York.

Conversations by NLX is a no-code platform that “enables brands to create automated, personalized voice, chat and multimodal conversations, all in one place,” the company says.

“With built-in reporting and analytics, teams can adjust conversations according to real-time qualitative and quantitative customer feedback to improve the customer experience.”

According to NLX, common use cases for the automation in travel include internal conversations around gate changes or flight schedule changes, and external conversations around seat upgrades, flight changes and cancellations and wheelchair requests.

Joel Whitley, partner and principal at IAG Capital Partners, says NLX’s technology “directly addresses customer pain points, while also making it cost-effective and easy for brands to implement.”

Although chatbot technology has evolved to handle a number of traveler queries, industry experts say that live agents still do certain things better .

Experts also weigh in on how ChatGPT, a new AI chatbot with human-like communication skills, could impact the travel space .