Y Combinator-backed startup Apten, an AI SMS and voice agent was launched on Thursday. Apten helps B2C (business-to-consumer) companies automate sales and marketing by handling inbound and outbound calls and texts constantly, following up at the right time and syncing up with knowledge base systems.
Co-founders Daniel Ho and Roshan Kumaraswamy recognized that B2C companies like insurance, home services, financial services, education and more rely on a combination of call centers, dialers, and automated text systems to convert new leads.
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Follow ups are not personalized and are manually done by humans, and most of the time, leads do not get immediate responses. In order to resolve this, the founders have come up with Apten, an AI agent which handles inbound and outbound texts and calls around the clock.
The product can also switch from SMS to voice, and vice-versa any time in the conversation. What makes Apten stand apart is that it is a multi-channel AI agent which guides leads down customizable conversation flows, and takes actions with systems—for instance, pull in quote premiums from an insurance company’s API.
“Apten doesn’t just handle inbound/outbound texts + calls 24/7. It can also switch between channels at anytime to meet a lead where they want to communicate,” Ho wrote in a LinkedIn post, announcing Apten’s launch.
Apten also syncs with the user’s knowledge base, to pull in relevant information at any time, allowing real time notifications. It also proactively identifies action items and gaps to bring a human in the loop.
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Featuring automatic tagging with organized leads and conversations with analytics, Apten uses natural language to define tags and categories. These various highlights of Apten make it a suitable integration for businesses that generate a high volume of leads, use SMS services, or phone calls to engage or follow up with leads, and want to introduce AI to their sales and marketing process.
Before starting Apten, Ho held various roles at Tesla as software product Manager and supply chain analytics program manager. Prior to that, he was also technical program manager at Amazon. Fellow founder Kumaraswamy was previously a software development engineer at Amazon Web Services (AWS).