VoiceBase - Frequently asked questions

1. What is the expected growth for the voice analytics market?
   

   The voice analytics software market size is expected to grow from USD 657 million in 2019 to USD 1,597 million by 2024, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 19.4% according to Voice Analytics Software Market 2019 Industry Research Report.

   Factors such as growing need to extract insights from customer interactions, rising demand to monitor improve agent performance, and growing focus on risk and fraud detection are expected to drive the market growth. Moreover, growing impact of AI and improving individual experience and increasing adoption of cloud-based solutions are expected to create ample opportunities for Voice Analytics Software solution vendors.
   Source: link to the report......

2. Why are there no VCs invested?
   The main reason is when we first started the company, our competitor Nuance was suiting every startup in our industry, so VCs stayed away.  We found a family office that invested anyway, now many years later, we are the only speech analytics company with the maturity to handle large enterprise clients.

   Our largest shareholder is a family office that was first money into Sun Microsystems.  He knew my co-founder who was one of the first people at Ringcentral and he tried to hire him for one of his investments that was a competitor of Ringcentral.  Jay stayed did all the major deals to make Ringcentral a multi-billion dollar company and IPO.  They realized we were doing the same here.

   More recently, we've seen a couple of VCs make large investments in adjacent industries.  Some of these companies were clients of ours, but since we are turning into an end to end solution - they are now slightly competitive.

3. What is the sentiment of the existing investors?
   Very positive. VoiceBase has very supportive investors and they are happy with the performance. They fully trust and support the board and executive team. Some of them have recently participated in recent rounds, or are considering participating in current rounds. Our largest investors are family offices who have known and worked with VoiceBase for many years.

4. What is the significance of the Poly MOU?
   Most medium size companies ($200m-$500m revenue) do not have the IT departments or the expertise to deploy expensive, complex legacy solutions – so they tend to fly blind which poses enormous risks.The VoiceBase Online product, shares the same platform as the Developer and Enterprise products, but is specifically configured to provide a simple, easily deployable solution without large IT org overhead. The real magic happens when it is paired with a Poly headset – high fidelity voice and accuracy that is a decade ahead of current solutions.

   In addition, VoiceBase is partnering with Poly (signed MOU) to distribute this solution, using their 6,000 representatives. The service deploys to a new purpose-built headset and existing poly devices in less than an hour.

   Beta customers will start in 1Q20 with product release in May 2020. Projection of 200,000 users by 2022 is conservative relative to Poly’s target of 400k customers.

   VoiceBase is targeting $230m recurring revenue from the combined offerings by the end of 2022.

5. How is the valuation justified?
   
   
   
   
6. Aren't call centres declining?

   No.  In fact, seats are increasing.  Call center seats have increased from 338k in 2007 up to 5.78 million in 2017.
   
   
   

   Source: DMG Consulting LLC

   Further, we believe stock prices are a good reflection of an industry. Teleperformance (TEP:FP) rent call-center services to the enterprise and their 5 yr performance is +283%.

7. Why have there been so many rounds?
   Since there have been no VC rounds, which typically raise higher amounts at earlier stages,  VoiceBase has been able to be more prudent with a higher number of rounds but each with a much smaller amount.Two reasons, first and main reason was it was at the request of the largest family office investor.  Second, it meant less dilution for existing investors compared to raising more money than was immediately needed. Several of the rounds were led by the same family office.

8. What is the pricing model? (If I have a 1000 call centre staff what is the cost to implement?)

   a) Developers: charged based on usage - pay as you go (per minute) - because often they don\'t know how successful their product will be

   b) Enterprises: annual agreement with 1 year prepay - they know exactly how many minutes a year they do, so are comfortable with that.

   c) Online: price per agent or seat

   All 3 roughly translate to 1-2 cents/min despite the different payment structure.

9. Is churn a factor?

   The nature of the business is such that there’s very little churn. When a company is using VoiceBase analytics they have integrations and development work and data histories and custom models and predictors which makes it very very hard to leave VoiceBase.

   Hence, even for the Developer ‘pay as you go’ vertical, they have programs that are so deeply integrated with our technology that churn isn’t a concern for VoiceBase.

10. Which sectors are currently most represented in the 25 or so clients and how do you see that evolving? 

    Sectors is hard to describe.  We apply to call centers across a broad range of industries. If we look at revenue, we get the most from call tracking industries and Telecom.  However, the growth over the next few months is from a broad range of industries such as Dish (satellite TV), Macys (largest department store), Zillow (Real Estate Portal), Uber (ride share) and GoDaddy (Web Hosting).  The common factor with these customers is the use cases, i.e. Sales, Service and Marketing.

    VoiceBase recently presented to Fortune 500 companies at the Tableau Conference TC19 in Vegas and the range of companies we met probably best indicates what it will evolve towards.  We can see that BANKING is number 4 and INSURANCE number 6. Generally banking, finance and insurance has a high demand for what we do.

11. Why does VoiceBase seem more expensive than other voice analytics providers on a cost per user basis?

    a)  You are not comparing like-with-like.  VoiceBase covers the whole stack of voice analytics (speech-to-text, keywords/topics, redaction, metrics, categories and prediction - AI).  The cost per user of competitors usually only covers one element.

    b) VoiceBase is much more accurate (e.g. 95% on text-to-speech v Google's 65%), which is necessary for the other analytics elements.

    c) VoiceBase has no serious competition in redaction, the removing of sensitive sate (e.g. credit card numbers).  Not just required for compliance, it's essential before any large scale data analysis can be carried out.

    d) Unlike most competitors, VoiceBase is fully integrated into the enterprise's existing systems, including CRM, meaning its UI fits in with the customer.  This makes changing very difficult.

If you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact us at:

 This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or call +44 20 3411 3210

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