Conversica Inc., a Foster City, California-based artificial intelligence provider focused on making sales teams more productive, today announced that it has raised $31 million in new funding.

Conversica offers an AI platform that enables companies to build conversational agents for automating interactions with prospects. These agents can engage users via email and texts, with support for other mediums including voice reportedly in the works. They allow sales departments to automate the more routine aspects of their lead nurturing efforts.

The typical salesperson spends much of their time reaching out to old contacts, prospects who downloaded marketing materials from their company’s site and other leads who may or may not have a chance of becoming paying customers. Such correspondence tends to be fairly repetitive, which allows it to be automated.

Conversica-powered agents use data from a company’s customer relationship management system and other applications to generate personalized sales emails. If a lead requests a quote for a product via a firm’s site, the AI will send them a message offering a demonstration of that solution. When the lead writes back, the software can schedule a time for the demonstration.

Conversica claims that its platform draws on a repository of more than 200 million sales interactions to converse with prospects in a human-like manner. The platform produces informal, plain-text messages written in first person designed to match the tone users expect from real sales representatives.

The fact that it’s all automated makes it possible to engage low-priority leads with a consistency often not feasible when representatives have to perform the task manually. The result, according to Conversica, is that firms can engage prospects who would otherwise slip through the cracks while freeing up person-hours in the process.

Conversica boasts that messages generated with its platform have reached more than 70 million people to date. The software is used at Microsoft Corp., AT&T Inc, Oracle Corp. and about 1,200 other organizations, a customer base that the provider will work to increase using the new funding by expanding its sales and marketing operations.

The main investor in the round was Providence Equity Partners LLC, the same private equity firm that led the Conversica’s previous Series B funding. It was joined by all of the provider’s other existing backers along with CIBC and Savano Capital.

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