Only have 1 minute? Read our 3 takeaways:
- Romanian conversational AI player DRUID announces the closing of a $30M Series B round, anchored by TQ Ventures, with participation from new and existing investors.
- The new capital injection will propel DRUID’s international expansion, with a specific focus on the US.
- This follows the company’s €14M Series A round in May 2022, bringing its total funding to over $44.5 million.
In a significant development, DRUID, a no-code conversational AI platform, has announced the successful closure of a $30 million Series B funding round. TQ Ventures spearheaded this funding round, with notable participation from new investors Smedvig Capital, Endeavor, and Verve Ventures. DRUID’s Series B also received continued support from existing investors GapMinder, Hoxton Ventures, and Karma Ventures.
The primary objective behind this substantial funding injection is to propel DRUID’s international expansion, with a specific focus on the US market. Currently, the US contributes a substantial 60% of DRUID’s total revenue, making it a strategic area for further growth and market penetration.
“Amid the fanfare around conversational and Generative AI, DRUID stood out to us as a category leader. We were pleased to discover through our research how much current customers value the platform and how large a problem DRUID is solving for prospective customers. We are honored to lead this round and partner with Liviu and the DRUID team,” said Schuster Tanger, co-managing partner at TQ Ventures.
A winning product
At the core of DRUID’s success lies its platform, which empowers enterprises to construct conversational business applications (CBAs). These CBAs aim to deliver authentic and natural interactions between businesses and their customers. A distinguishing feature of DRUID’s platform is its seamless integration with existing technology infrastructures, allowing companies to leverage their prior investments in ERP, CRM, RPA, and other digital tools fully.
DRUID’s CBA goes beyond typical conversational AI capabilities. It possesses the ability to comprehend complex business contexts and trigger intelligent actions. This feature creates a user-friendly conversational layer that fosters closer customer interactions across multiple channels, simplifying intricate business processes.
The company has also made headlines with its recent integration with ChatGPT through Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service. This integration fortifies the platform’s position as enterprise-ready and offers robust security measures.
Liviu Drăgan, the CEO, emphasized, “We believe our platform will, for large international enterprises, ignite a new era of productivity and tangible business outcomes.”
DRUID’s milestones throughout the years
Furthermore, DRUID, like any success story, started with a big, hairy, audacious goal. Back in 2018, Liviu Dragan (CEO), Andreea Plesea (Global VP, CCSO), Bogdan Pietroiu (CTO), and Daniel Balaceanu (CPO), who had already been working together for 15 years, left their jobs at the time and embarked on a new journey together. They started the conversational AI platform DRUID with the goal of offering a virtual assistant for every role in the company and every employee.
Today, the company has companies with over 10,000 employees that use virtual assistants to interact with any department of the company, from legal to HR, procurement or finance. And the company hasn’t stopped dreaming.
In 2022, DRUID raised a Series A round to help the company scale its solution internationally in Europe and North America. They have expanded the global team by 60% and onboarded key former UiPath executives in strategic roles, including Kedar Dani, former Global VP for design, Vargha Moayed, ex-Chief Strategy Officer, and Mihai Faur, CIO of UiPath. By the end of the year, they had witnessed a 2.5-fold increase in annual recurring revenue compared to the previous year. The upward trajectory continues: forecasts for 2023 predict a three-fold growth.
So far, several prominent industry leaders have already adopted DRUID’s technology. Companies such as Kmart, Liberty Global, Texas Children’s Hospital, White Castle, NHS, Auchan, Georgia Southern University, Société Générale, Erste Group, BNP Paribas, and Axa have integrated DRUID’s Conversational Business Applications platform. According to DRUID, their experiences have shown significant enhancements in customer engagement and employee efficiency.
In the light of participating in DRUID’s Series B, Dan Mihăescu, Founding Partner at GapMinder, reflected on the company’s journey, stating, “The international validation of the revolutionary platform built by DRUID convinced us for our third investment in the company.”
Bolstered by this recent investment round, DRUID is well-positioned to deliver technological solutions that empower customers to maximize their value.
