SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- Nov. 29, 2004 -- Utopy(R), Inc., a leading provider of speech analytics solutions for the contact center and government intelligence markets, today announced that it has secured over $4 million in additional capital, bringing the total funding to over $10 million. Blacksmith Capital led the round of funding with Utopy's existing investors, and Phil Black, Senior Managing Member of Blacksmith, will join Utopy's Board of Directors.
"At Utopy, we are very excited to partner with Blacksmith, a premier Silicon Valley based venture capital firm," said Utopy CEO Roy Twersky. "The partners at Blacksmith Capital have years of experience shaping the success of many market-leading technology companies and bring far more to this partnership than capital."
"We have been very impressed with Utopy's customer traction and its strongly defendable technology and intellectual property. A corporation's contact center has become the main human customer touch-point for the Fortune 2000. Utopy's SpeechMiner(R) product line allows the customer to "listen" to every recorded call to increase sales revenues, reduce churn, and improve customer satisfaction while reducing call handling time and transaction inefficiencies," explained Phil Black. "Furthermore, recordings of audio in contact centers, intercepted telephone communications for intelligence purposes and Internet radio are probably the biggest untapped, unstructured information source for decision makers. In our view, Utopy solves the voice data mining challenge through innovative technology and has a management team with the experience to capture the market leadership position."
Utopy will use the funding to support its new customers and sales channels and continue research and development of its speech analytics technology.
Roy Twersky, president and CEO of Utopy, said, "As the Speech Analytics market grows and matures, our customers and partners recognize the importance of accuracy, ease of use, and functionalities of Utopy's SpeechMiner platform. This latest show of support from the VC community and our existing investors is a clear endorsement of Utopy's unique approach to speech mining and a catalyst to accelerate our market expansion efforts."
About Utopy
As a leader in Speech Analytics technology, Utopy offers analytics solutions to improve contact center profitability and enhance homeland security. Utopy's award-winning and patent-pending product suite, SpeechMiner, identifies, evaluates and catalogs informative events inside person-to-person telephone conversations, thereby transforming audio data into structured knowledge-base, reports, and alerts for decision makers. SpeechMiner utilizes Deliberate Listening(TM), the latest advances of speech analytics technology and web-based software, to help contact centers reduce call-handling time, increase sales performance, enhance customer satisfaction, automate the quality management processes, and provide a wide range of business intelligence from recorded conversations. Headquartered in San Francisco, CA, Utopy's team has extensive experience in speech analytics, contact center technology, mission-critical intelligence systems, and the business processes associated with improving operating performance. Utopy's customers include Fortune 200 companies as well as other innovators in contact center operations. For additional information about Utopy and its award-winning SpeechMiner suite of products, visit www.utopy.com, email info@utopy.com or call 866.44.UTOPY (866.448.8679).
About Blacksmith Capital
Blacksmith Capital was formed by Phil Black and John Burke on July 1, 2003 to create a new franchise working with the very best entrepreneurs in rapid-growth technology markets. With over 22 years of cumulative venture capital experience at Summit Partners, Weiss, Peck & Greer Venture Partners and ABS Ventures, it is our goal to build a portfolio of market-leading technology companies that differentiate themselves through superior, equity-efficient execution. An entrepreneur's ability to 'do more with less' and to focus the business on what customers want and will pay for today without losing fiscal responsibility are examples of equity-efficiency and Blacksmith Capital want entrepreneurs that believe this concept as much as we do. Blacksmith Capital is based in San Francisco with an office in Northern Virginia and serves as a bridge between to the two coasts for our portfolio companies. We are actively investing in companies on the West Coast that wish to access our network of Washington D.C. area connections and Mid-Atlantic firms that wish for an entree into the much larger Silicon Valley venture market. www.blacksmithcapital.com.
Utopy, SpeechMiner, SpeechMiner Enterprise, SpeechMiner Root-Cause, SpeechMiner Customer Satisfaction and Deliberate Listening, are registered trademarks or trademarks of Utopy, Inc. All other trademarks mentioned here are the properties of their respective owners.
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