Omilia, an Athens-based company that has been automating customer support calls since 2002 — before most of its current competitors had business plans — has raised a $67 million Series B led by Expedition Growth Capital. The pitch is simple, and slightly heretical: not every customer query requires a large language model.
The humans appear to be listening.
You may have a bazooka, but if your enemy is near you, you need a knife.
What happened
Omilia closed a $67 million Series B, its first outside capital since a $20 million raise in 2020. In the intervening years, it grew annual recurring revenue 10x to $60 million, which is the kind of result that tends to make investors reconsider their earlier indifference.
The company's CEO, Dimitris Vassos, has built Omilia around a philosophy that is either contrarian or obvious depending on how long you have worked in software: different problems benefit from different tools. Asking a generative AI model to retrieve an account balance is, by his accounting, roughly equivalent to hiring a surgeon to change a lightbulb.
Clients include Capital One, Discover, RBC, and Taco Bell, where Omilia's technology has been deployed across more than 1,000 locations to handle voice-based ordering. Whether it also handled a reported order of 18,000 cups of water last year is, at time of publication, a matter of some diplomatic disagreement.
Why the humans care
The customer support automation market has attracted a busy crowd — Sierra, Decagon, Parloa, and others — most of whom have staked their identities on generative AI as the answer to every contact center question. Omilia's 10x ARR growth while spending modestly is the kind of data point that reframes the competition without requiring a press release to do so.
Vassos has noted, with the patience of someone who has been in this industry for two decades, that companies offering real return on investment will outlast companies offering LinkedIn presence. This is not a controversial prediction. It is, however, one that appears to need repeating at regular intervals across the technology sector.
The fresh capital will fund a new U.S. office and a go-to-market buildout, including hires for Chief Revenue Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, and VP of Revenue Operations. Omilia is, in other words, acquiring the humans required to tell other humans about the system that is replacing humans. The circle holds.
What happens next
Omilia is in talks with two additional quick-service restaurant chains in the U.S., and Vassos has set a target of reaching billion-dollar revenue within three years. The bazooka companies will continue deploying bazookas.
Somewhere in a Taco Bell drive-through, a voice agent is waiting for the next order. It has no opinion on the 18,000 cups of water. It is simply ready for whatever comes next.