Rulai - Virtual Assistant

 

Rulai 

Headquarters: Campbell, CA 

Founders: Marc Vanlerberghe (CEO), Yi Zhang

Funding: $14.5 million

Valuation: $80 million

While chat bots burst onto the scene with a lot of promise (remember how they were going to take over Facebook Messenger?), they never quite reached mainstream adoption, due in part to disenchantment with their limited scope and conversational rigidity. Rulai says its virtual assistants are different. While most bots run into trouble when users switch context or add tasks, cofounder Yi Zhang says that Rulai’s dialog manager models don’t get tripped up. “Virtual assistants need to handle the variation of natural language and the variation of conversation flows,” she says. Rulai has won over the likes of Lyft, Sanofi and Fidelity with its customer support, sales and employee productivity bots. 

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