Bland.ai raises $16M and asks: Are you still hiring humans?

Have you been following Bland.ai? They've just announced $16M in funding after emerging from stealth – bringing their total raise to $22M.

Here's the first paragraph from their release:

Today Bland AI, the platform automating phone calls for the enterprise using hyper-realistic AI agents, emerged from stealth with a $16M Series A financing round led by Scale Venture Partners. The developers of the AI Phone Calling Platform will use the funds to hire and continue helping businesses streamline a wide range of phone-based tasks, from customer support to sales to internal operations. With this financing, Bland AI has raised a total of $22M; other investors include: Y Combinator and angel investors Max Levchin the founder of Paypal, Piotr Dąbkowski the CTO of Eleven Labs CTO, Jeff Lawson the founder of Twilio, and others.

The company's boiler-plate gives a good overview of their offering:

Bland AI is a Conversational AI platform that automates phone calls for businesses using hyper-realistic AI agents. Founded in 2023, Bland AI's mission is to revolutionize how enterprises handle phone communications, enabling more efficient, personalized interactions at scale.

The way in which they've launched - somewhat dramatically (their founder video has had 3.6M views so far, since yesterday) is likely to catch a lot of attention.

Existing vendors (and in particular, those who haven't been prioritising their marketing activities) should be both celebrating and slightly apprehensive.

Celebrating, because Bland.ai is doing a good job of bringing the 'Are you still hiring humans?' question to the forefront of the business world. It will surely have already reached executive attention at many, many companies by today. This is only good for the wider Conversational AI market.

Apprehensive, because the investors backing the likes of Bland.ai recognise that there is no real winner in the space yet. No runaway 'wow' player. Not yet. And this includes you and your company. There's everything to play for. Run fast.

There's also a lot of players sitting on the sidelines watching the Conversational AI space both from a Private Equity and a Corporate Development standpoint. (I know, because some of them are calling for my opinions now and again, and that's always exciting).

Good luck to the team at Bland.ai. I shall be watching with strong interest.

Here's their Tweet announcement from yesterday. Do go and watch the video of their founder speaking too - you can press play from the Tweet. He does a good job.