2024 Speech Industry Award Winner: Capacity Deepens Voice and Contact Center Capabilities with Acquisitions

St. Louis-based artificial intelligence software company Capacity has been on an acquisition spree over the past year or so, grabbing up a number of fairly prominent speech technology vendors to expand its contact center capabilities.

The buying spree was fueled by investments of more than $60 million from funding rounds dating back to the company launch in 2017, most recently with a $38 million round that closed in 2022.

The first acquisition was San Diego-based speech and voice technology provider LumenVox a year ago for an undisclosed amount. LumenVox’s technology includes automatic speech recognition, call progress analysis, voice biometrics, and text-to-speech tools. LumenVox works with companies to build secure self-service and customer-agent interactions. Its tools will enable Capacity users to transform customer engagement with AI-driven speech recognition and voice authentication technology.

“LumenVox’s tools are key in our expansion into voice automation,” said David Karandish, Capacity’s cofounder and CEO, at the time.

“The right voice technology can save teams countless support hours. Marrying LumenVox’s technology with the Capacity platform ensures voice is a seamless part of the omnichannel experience,” said Nigel Quinnin, CEO of LumenVox who joined Capacity to oversee its voice operations.

Then this summer, Capacity acquired CereProc and SmartAction, significantly expanding further its voice and contact center offerings. Financial terms of those deals were not disclosed either.

CereProc, based in Edinburgh, Scotland, creates scalable synthesized voices for use on applications, web, and multimedia interfaces.

SmartAction, based in Fort Worth, Texas, provides AI-powered virtual agents to contact centers via its NOVA platform for omnichannel support, personalized interactions, and proactive follow-up.

“CereProc’s text-to-speech technology allows us to build on the industry-leading voice experiences we are already delivering to our customers. And with SmartAction’s innovative NOVA platform, Capacity customers will now be able to seamlessly integrate AI-powered voice agents into their customer experience workflows,” Karandish said. “For brands obsessed with their CX, every moment matters. We are thrilled to bring together three like-minded brands that are laser-focused on delivering customer-first experiences.”

“The right speech tools are essential for contact center efficiency. CereWave AI, our advanced synthetic speech engine, is easily embeddable and customizable with a voice of a customer’s choice, making it an ideal enhancement in a complete solution like Capacity,” said Paul Welham, CEO of CereProc. Welham continues to lead CereProc and serves as a member of the Capacity executive leadership team.

Now Capacity’s speech recognition, using transcribed audio, can understand human accents in any language without a complete phonetic lexicon for training new language models. And with its NLU Gateway, companies can speech-enable any application without being tied to a specific intent engine.

And though Denim Social is not a speech technology vendor, Capacity also acquired the social media management firm, adding social media management and marketing software for organizations in the banking, insurance, mortgage and wealth management fields to its portfolio. That followed the acquisition of Textel, a cloud-based text messaging platform provider, at the start of 2023.

Karandish said all of its acquisitions in the past year or so round out the five key channels in which Capacity believes companies can automate support for customers. They include web, email, text messaging, voice, and social media.

Karandish expects that with these new technology additions his company on a monthly basis will analyze 300 million calls, send 10 million text messages, and account for 500,000 social media posts. Karandish said the company’s “all-in-one” approach will allow customers to streamline their operations around customer support and engagement.

“We want to be in a position where you can manage all of your customer experience and all of your team experience through Capacity,” he said. “Customers need support everywhere. Our expanded platform will free up team members to do their best work while also building more meaningful relationships with their customers.

“Customer expectations are rising, and that means support teams need better tools to improve customer experiences and free up their agents to solve higher-level challenges,” he concluded.