https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/28/directly-nabs-20m-led-by-samsung-to-help-make-customer-service-chatbots-more-intelligent-adds-new-ceo/

Chatbots have had a patchy track record world of tech, where early efforts not only failed to deliver on the magical idea of a computer producing the exact answers you were looking for in a chat-based-Q&A, they even produced surprising (and not in a good way) results instead. Things have moved along, though, and today a startup that’s built a platform to help improve chatbots’ responses is announcing a round of funding from a key strategic investor, a sign of demand and evidence that its solution is working.

Directly — which has built a platform to help train companies’ chatbots by crowdsourcing experts and analysing chatbot usage to better “teach” the AI systems underpinning them — has raised $20 million in funding led by Samsung NEXT (Samsung’s VC arm), with participation also from Industry Ventures, AvidBank, and existing investors M12 (Microsoft’s VC), Costanoa Ventures, True Ventures and Northgate.