‘With my experience in the past selling into the VAR and MSP channels, we think there’s a big opportunity to focus on that and to work with MSP partners to bring these AI phone agents to market,’ says Vida CEO Lyle Pratt.

Carrier-grade AI voice agent developer Vida unveiled the launch of a new platform and API for telecom service providers.

The company also said it has received a $3 million seed funding round led by Los Angeles-based investment firm Stillmark Venture Capital.

Vida provides lifelike and realistic AI phone agents through its proprietary carrier-grade platform and specifically targets SMBs, said Lyle Pratt, CEO of the Austin, Texas-based company.

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“With my experience in the past selling into the VAR and MSP channels, we think there’s a big opportunity to focus on that and to work with MSP partners to bring these AI phone agents to market,” he said.

AI phone agents, Pratt said, can converse and sound like a real person.

“They sound lifelike,” he said. “They can actually execute tasks and perform functions just like a person would. A good example of that would be scheduling appointments. Let’s say you’re an auto dealership and you’re scheduling maintenance appointments. Or maybe you’re a law firm, or a restaurant taking orders. These AI phone agents integrate with over 7,000 different applications to do things just like a real person while they’re talking to you on the phone in a natural way.”

Historically, what used to be called conversational voice agents were really only available to bigger companies and were still really decision-tree-based applications, Pratt said.

“Those solutions are really geared toward much bigger companies with much bigger budgets,” he said. “Now that we’ve had this, let’s call it an AI ‘Cambrian explosion,’ over the last few years, it’s no longer necessary. These are complex systems. And now we can make these things so that they’re simple enough for an SMB to set up themselves. But they’re also capable enough to do some of the same things that a medium-size business would need via integration with specific software or CRM or whatever customers might need them to do.”

Pratt said that his previous startup built a Communications Platform as a Service for customers.

“So I know a lot about how those old-school systems are built, what their limitations are and what they can actually do,” he said. “What essentially led us to build and start this company was the realization that all that tech that has been built in the last 10 or 15 years to facilitate the last generation of UCaaS IVR [interactive voice response] systems is all obsolete now. The entire business communication space is moving toward AI-enabled communications and agents like ours.”

Vida runs its own LLMs for some things while also integrating with OpenAI’s GPT4, depending on what a customer’s agent is doing, Pratt said.

“The key thing is that the power and capability of these LLMs, whether from Meta or OpenAI or Anthropic, is going to continue to increase at an incredible pace over the next half-decade,” he said. “And the time to start building a product that can be sold into VAR and MSP channels is now because the capabilities of these things is just continue to accelerate.”

Vida’s carrier-grade AI voice agents integrate with over 7,000 applications, including Salesforce, Freshdesk or Cox Automotive’s Xtime product, which is used by about 70 percent of U.S. auto dealerships for maintenance and service scheduling, Pratt said.

“These agents can create and update tickets in your ticketing software, or if they’re doing an outbound sales call or follow-up, maybe somebody just filled out a form on your website and you want to automatically call them and make sure they’re the right fit, the agent can update and add notes into your CRM, just like a sales development resource in your organization. Integrations are actually really, really important.”

Digerati Technologies, a San Antonio-based provider of UCaaS services to SMBs via its operating subsidiary Verve Cloud, has signed with Vida to incorporate its AI agents into is UCaaS offerings, said Digerati CEO Arthur Smith.

Digerati offers a complete bundle for small businesses when it comes to connectivity and UCaaS, with nearly 50,000 business users primarily across 4,300 to 4,400 customers in Texas, Florida and California, Smith told CRN.

Digerati started working with Vida because Smith has known Pratt for about 12 years, he said.

“I know that he’s really good at developing solutions,” he said. “He’s a self-described technology geek and a great executive manager and CEO. But at the core, he’s a developer. He’s done this before. We worked with him on a previous technology that he developed. And I got to know him there. And so when I found out he was working on conversational AI technology, I knew that we needed to do something with him. He is just good at what he does. He surrounds himself with talent that will get the job done.”

Digerati has been engaged with Vida for a couple of months now, Smith said.

“Vida is doing the heavy lifting,” he said. “Vida’s team knows the telecom space. They come from the telecom space. In fact, the last application Lyle developed was a telecom application he sold to a fairly large CLEC [competitive local exchange carrier]. So he knows telecom. That’s a big plus.”

Vida’s AI voice agent technology will be applicable to applications that can be brought onto Digerati’s UCaaS system with call queues and IVR, Smith said.

“I don’t know if you’ve ever called a place that has an extensive IVR, but you get lost in the IVR with pressing 2, pressing 3,” he said. “Oh my gosh, it’s crazy. That’s going to change dramatically with the kind of technology that Vida has. We see a lot of opportunity there. It’s like having a live person. And it just changes everything.”

Looking ahead, Pratt said Vida will continue to add integrations to its carrier-grade AI voice agent, with health-care integrations slated to roll out next year.

“We’re also going to be coming out with a new partner management portal so partners can do billing themselves or use our own billing tools,” he said.