Aiello banks US$5.8M to take its voice AI assistant for hotels beyond Taiwan

Aiello, a natural language processing (NLP) and voice AI startup based in Taipei, has received US$5.8 million in a pre-Series A+ funding round led JAFCO Asia and Wistron Corporation.

Existing investor Cornerstone Ventures also participated in the round.

“The new funds will be used to accelerate business in international markets, especially in Japan and Thailand, where we see good traction. We also plan to boost R&D and launch a new product, a ‘conversation intelligence platform’ aiming to improve corporate sales and meeting efficiency. This platform, which focuses on AI-driven voice and audio analysis and collaboration, is expected to be launched by the end of this year,” said Vic Shen, Founder and CEO of Aiello.

Founded in January 2019 with a founding team from Google, Qualcomm, and HTC, the startup offers Aiello Voice Assistant (AVA), a natural language understanding (NLU)-based solution dedicated to hospitality.

AVA drives additional hotel revenue, increases direct bookings, and encourages guest loyalty. It analyses the needs and usage behaviours of guests during their stay and extracts data which can be used to improve hotel management.

“Our data shows that AVA has reduced front desk workloads in hotels where it is deployed by approximately 30 per cent. For a hotel with 200 rooms, that represents more than 300 hours of labour time in six months”, added Shen. “According to our findings, our AI voice assistant also helps hotels increase their social media exposure by up to 10x, largely thanks to guests sharing their experiences.”

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The firm claims its AI solutions process more than 900,000 speeches and text interactions per month in Chinese, English, Thai, and Japanese.

Over the past six months, Aiello has won multiple international hotel contracts in Japan, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore. Several leading hotel brands recently signed corporate-level service contracts with the company.

This year, the number of AVA-equipped guest rooms is expected to increase an impressive 2.5x compared to 2021.

John Lin, MD of JAFCO Asia Taiwan, remarked: “Aiello is one of the few AI companies in Asia with a scalable business model. In the post-pandemic era, enterprises’ labour shortages and digital transformation are visible trends. We expect that the demand for AI and intelligent voice in enterprises will be higher and higher, and Aiello is bound to play an important role. ”

Aiello has raised over US$10 million in funding since its inception four years ago. It closed its pre-Series A round in 2021, co-lead by Chunghwa PCHome Fund I, Zylux Acoustic Corporation, and ColoplNext.

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