DRUID, a Bucharest-based conversational AI platform for enterprise companies, announced on Tuesday that it has secured $15M (approximately €14.2M) in a Series A round of funding.
The round was co-led by Karma Ventures and Hoxton Ventures, and joined by GapMinder and four other investors from Germany, Switzerland, Poland, and Romania.
Fund utilisation
DRUID says it will use the funds to accelerate its international expansion across Europe and North America by hiring new talents to support its growth.
The company intends to open new offices in France and Germany by 2022, and consolidate its existing presence in the UK and US.
The company also plans to add new capabilities to its conversational AI offering and improve the user experience.
Liviu Drăgan, CEO of DRUID, says, “The fresh round of funding will be used to strengthen our global reach and ambitious international goals. Following our vision to deliver a virtual assistant for every employee, DRUID is a global leader in AI-driven conversational business applications that assist organisations in delivering their digital transformation agendas.”
He adds, “Leveraging our market-validated platform, our goal is to empower businesses worldwide in using DRUID solutions to secure customer loyalty and boost employee retention for businesses of all sizes. We are going beyond the present typical constraints of conversational solutions to create a new category of products, Conversational Business Applications (CBA), that will enable AI to successfully drive complex processes and help people achieve better business results.”
DRUID: What you need to know
Founded by Andreea Plesea, Daniel Balaceanu, and Liviu Dragan in 2018, DRUID’s no-code platform enables enterprises to automate customer and employee communications using AI-driven virtual assistants.
The company’s virtual assistants enable fast, personalised, omnichannel, and hyper-automated interactions.
DRUID became the first company in 2019 to give voice to RPA robots, adding conversational skills to the world’s first hyper-automation platform through its global alliance with UiPath.
The Hungarian company is on a mission to provide each employee with an intelligent virtual assistant, and has established an extensive 130+ partner network, most notably with UiPath, and services 100+ clients from around the world.
DRUID reached a 3.8x Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) growth rate at the end of December, 2021, compared to 2020 and already achieved a 2.8x growth at the end of Q1 2022 compared to the same period last year.
Investors
Based out of Tallinn, Karma Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm funding Europe’s deep tech startups. The VC backs companies with strong ideas delivered with unique technology, customer traction and global ambition.
“DRUID is our first investment in Romania. UiPath has let the whole world know about the great potential of the Romanian tech ecosystem and we are glad that we have an opportunity to work with Liviu Dragan and his team on another fast-growing software company,” says Kristjan Laannemaa, Founding Partner at Karma VC.
Based out of London, Hoxton Ventures focuses on startups that either disrupt existing industries or invent entirely new market categories. Hoxton typically invests between $500K and $5M into pre-seed, seed, and Series A stage companies.
“At Hoxton, we back businesses from Europe that can scale globally. We’re excited by DRUID’s growth in the U.S. and are confident that with this new funding, it will grow into the category leader for Conversational Business Applications,” says Hussein Kanji, partner at Hoxton Ventures.
