Vilnius-based Oxus.AI, a startup aiming to bring the advantages of speech analytics to sales teams working in any language in the world, has raised €800K. The pre-seed round saw participation from 70V, Startup Wise Guys, Grouport, and a number of angel investors. The company has also secured €200K from Norway Grants. The company will be using the funds to strengthen its product and scale to new markets. 

Sales teams operating in well-resourced languages like English are already benefiting from AI-powered tools that analyse calls and provide guidelines for improvement. As most speech processing research is heavily biased towards English and other well-resourced languages, teams working in other languages are underserved. They still have to manually listen to calls in order to understand what top performers are doing well and transfer this knowledge to the rest of the team. 

If a company only analyses 1 call in 100, it misses out on 99% of the data that could be used to boost performance. Unlocking this data and coupling it with results-oriented feedback has the potential to quickly improve a team’s or a company’s sales record while bringing a better experience to end customers.

“Constructive and timely feedback is the only way to have someone in your team improve. With team leads being physically able to listen to less than 1% of the calls their colleagues are making, such feedback comes infrequently. It is also difficult for team leads to provide valuable feedback based on individual cases rather than on patterns that are hard to see due to the lack of comprehensive data,” states Mindaugas Bružas, co-founder and CEO of Oxus.AI. 

Speech-to-text approaches are less efficient in low-resource languages, especially when the quality of the recording is low. Oxus.AI has built a novel solution based on a limited dictionary search method. This allows the speech analytics engine to scale to other languages with just a fraction of the data required for a speech-to-text solution while providing a higher degree of accuracy.

What this means for sales and customer support teams working in low-resource languages, is that they can finally harness advanced tools, which were previously available only to their peers working in English and other well-resourced languages, and improve their performance.

“We want to help companies bridge the language technology gap, and help improve sales in any language, from Swedish to Swahili,” Donatas Tamošauskas, the company’s co-founder and CTO says. “We also see future applications of our technology in other areas, where on-the-spot speech recognition is needed, from identifying false advertising in live streams to detecting crucial information in emergency calls.”

The pre-seed round of €600K was raised from Startup Wise Guys, 70V, Grouport VC funds, and a number of angel investors that includes industry and AI experts: Regimantas Liepa (ex-EVP of Transcom), Renaldas Zioma (Unity), and others. Oxus.AI has also won a €200K grant from Norway Grants, who rated the company’s solution second out of 30 scheme participants. The company will use the funds to expand its team of engineers and test out its product across multiple industries as well as languages.

“Oxus.AI has tremendous market potential. From our corporate partners’ network, we clearly see that there is a lack of an effective automated solution that measures the performance of calls smoothly and precisely, and Oxus.AI has definitely developed one,” Cristobal Aloso, CEO  at Startup Wise Guys, says.

Oxus.AI was established in Lithuania in 2020 by CEO Mindaugas Bružas and CTO Donatas Tamošauskas. Mindaugas, a seasoned CEO, comes from an entrepreneurial background and is the first investor and ex-board member of Interactio, a leading remote simultaneous interpretation platform. Donatas is a Machine Learning engineer, who honed his AI skills at the National University of Singapore, and had previously worked at Vinted – Lithuania’s first unicorn and Singapore’s fintech-AI startup FinGenesis.