Encore AI Raises $30 Million to Build Voice Agents That Learn From Your Best Sales Calls

Key points

• Encore AI, a New York-based startup, closed a $30 million Series A funding round led by venture firm Team8.
• The company's AI voice agents, software that can hold spoken conversations with customers on its own, learn by analysing recordings of a company's best-performing human sales calls.
• Encore has more than 40 enterprise customers, most of them financial institutions, and says annual recurring revenue has grown more than five times since its seed round less than 18 months ago.
• Investors include Planven, Lukatz and Garage, plus a group of banks and insurers, several of which invested after first using the product.

Picture a bank's top relationship manager. She remembers the right moment to crack a joke, gives the perfect example that puts a nervous client at ease, and always knows when to push and when to back off. Now imagine recording hundreds of her calls, studying every move that closed a deal, and feeding all of it to an AI. That is, in plain terms, what Encore AI does.

The startup, first reported by TechCrunch, raised $30 million in a Series A round to scale up that idea. Team8, a venture firm focused on enterprise technology, led the round. It's a similar thesis to the one we tracked on 15 July when Rime raised $24 million to make AI phone calls feel less like talking to a robot: both bets rest on the idea that better training data, drawn from real conversations rather than scraped internet audio, is the edge that matters.

What problem is Encore actually solving?

Every sales or support team has a few people who are brilliant and many who are average. Encore's platform tries to close that gap by working out, scientifically, what the brilliant ones do differently.

Founder and CEO Dvir Ginzburg calls the process "interaction mining." The platform collects call recordings and text messages, then connects that data to a company's existing CRM system, short for customer relationship management system, the software businesses use to track every contact with a client. It breaks each conversation into stages and scores which moments helped move a deal forward and which caused it to stall.

From those patterns, Encore builds an AI voice agent. That agent can call or message customers directly, or sit quietly in the background, whispering suggestions to a human rep mid-conversation.

"Sometimes our agents even tell the jokes that the relationship managers are telling," Ginzburg told TechCrunch. "The agent we build is a package of many different playbooks that have worked throughout the process."

Should customers be worried about talking to a robot?

The agents sound and behave like people because they're trained on real people. Whether a customer realises they're speaking to software will depend on how each company chooses to deploy the tool.

Encore's more than 40 enterprise clients are mostly financial institutions, where the stakes of a bad conversation are high and the value of a good one is enormous. Worth watching: our earlier story on British Gas cutting 1,300 call centre jobs showed how fast that calculus can shift once a firm decides AI is good enough.

What happens next?

Encore plans to use the new funding to grow its US sales team and sign up more large banks and insurers. Founded in 2022 under the name Insait IO, the company originally built advice tools for financial planners before pivoting to its current focus.

The bigger threat is the established giants. Salesforce, SAP and HubSpot all sit on mountains of customer data and could, in theory, build very similar agents. Ginzburg isn't losing sleep yet. His argument is that those companies have never treated conversation history as the core ingredient, and rebuilding their systems to do so would be a massive undertaking. "For them to start asking for conversational data with their current employees will require changing their entire implementation stack and technological stack," he told TechCrunch.

For ordinary customers, the practical upshot is simple: the next time a financial services rep seems to know exactly the right thing to say, there's a growing chance an AI helped write the script.

Common questions

Is this just a chatbot with a fancier name?

Not exactly. A standard chatbot follows a fixed script. Encore's agents learn from thousands of real conversations and adjust their approach based on what's actually worked with similar customers in the past.

Do employees lose their jobs if the AI takes over calls?

Encore markets the tool both as a full replacement for some calls and as a real-time assistant alongside human staff. How each company deploys it is their own choice, and right now most clients appear to be using it to support their teams rather than replace them wholesale.