Funding
$270.00M
2026
Valuation & Funding
Cresta closed a $125 million Series D in November 2024, co-led by World Innovation Lab and Qatar Investment Authority, bringing total funding to over $270 million.
The company's funding history includes a $50 million Series B in March 2021 backed by Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, and Andreessen Horowitz, followed by an $80 million Series C in March 2022.
Investors across rounds include Tiger Global, Accenture, Qualcomm Ventures, and Workday Ventures.
Product
Cresta operates as an AI copilot that sits on every customer interaction in a contact center, listening to phone calls, chats, and emails in real-time. The platform uses large language models to understand customer intent and whisper guidance to human agents in under 200 milliseconds, or power fully autonomous conversations when deployed as a virtual agent.
The system integrates directly with existing contact center infrastructure including telephony platforms like Genesys, Five9, and Amazon Connect, plus CRM systems like Salesforce, Zendesk, and ServiceNow. No customer data gets copied out - Cresta streams transcripts, analyzes them, and sends guidance back in real-time.
For human agents, the platform displays a side panel with real-time hints and checklists based on top performer behaviors. It includes generative knowledge assist that provides ChatGPT-style answers citing exact knowledge base articles, plus smart compose features that draft replies and after-call summaries for one-click acceptance.
The AI Agent module runs fully automated conversations using the same intent and outcome models, with built-in escalation to human agents when needed. The Agent Operations Center gives supervisors a unified dashboard to monitor both human and AI agents simultaneously, allowing real-time intervention and control over hybrid workforces.
Business Model
Cresta sells B2B SaaS to enterprise contact centers on a subscription. Pricing is based on the number of agent seats and feature tiers, with customers typically signing annual contracts.
Sales targets large enterprises with sizable contact center operations, where ROI from improved agent performance and reduced training time supports premium pricing. Implementation integrates with existing telephony and CRM infrastructure without wholesale platform replacement.
Revenue expands via seat growth as customers roll the platform out to more agents, and via feature upsells as organizations add capabilities like AI agents and advanced analytics. Once embedded in daily workflows and supervisor dashboards, switching costs increase.
Real-time processing requirements and AI model training drive ongoing cloud infrastructure costs, and the company funds R&D to maintain sub-200 millisecond response times and model accuracy across different industries and use cases.
Competition
Overlay specialists
Direct competitors include Observe.AI, which expanded from quality assurance into voice AI agents, and Balto, which focuses on real-time guidance for sales and support calls. Level AI competes with its conversation intelligence platform, while Cogito differentiates through emotion AI signals layered with generative AI summaries.
ASAPP serves Fortune 100 contact centers with its AutoAssist and GenerativeAgent suite, used by companies like Best Buy and American Airlines. These overlay vendors compete on deployment speed and integration flexibility but face pricing pressure from vertically integrated platforms.
Vertically integrated platforms
Major contact center platforms like NICE, Genesys, Talkdesk, and Dialpad are bundling AI coaching and automation features directly into their core offerings. These incumbents can price AI capabilities at or near zero marginal cost by leveraging control of the underlying telephony infrastructure.
Microsoft's integration of AI into Teams and other communication tools creates another competitive vector, especially for organizations already committed to the Microsoft ecosystem. The trend toward unified platforms puts pressure on standalone AI vendors to prove superior performance or unique capabilities.
Cloud providers
Amazon Connect, Google Cloud Contact Center AI, and Microsoft's communication services offer AI-powered features as part of broader cloud infrastructure deals. These providers can bundle AI capabilities with compute, storage, and other services, making it difficult for specialized vendors to compete on total cost of ownership.
The cloud giants also have advantages in AI model development and can offer contact center AI as one component of larger enterprise agreements, creating procurement and integration advantages over point solutions.
TAM Expansion
New products
Email support integration expands Cresta's addressable market to capture the roughly 17% of customer service volume that occurs through email channels. This omnichannel approach allows the same AI models to analyze 100% of customer interactions rather than just voice and chat.
Real-time voice translation and multilingual capabilities open global markets where contact centers operate across multiple languages. This feature allows multinational companies to deploy a single Cresta instance rather than maintaining separate language-specific teams and tools.
The Agent Operations Center positions Cresta as a system of record for hybrid human-AI workforces, moving beyond point solution status to become central infrastructure for contact center management and supervision.
Customer base expansion
Hard-phone and on-premise integration capabilities address the 35-40% of contact center seats still running on legacy TDM and PBX infrastructure. This expansion unlocks a customer segment historically unable to adopt cloud-native AI solutions.
HIPAA compliance and responsible AI certification lower barriers for regulated industries including healthcare, financial services, and government agencies. These verticals typically offer higher deal sizes and margins compared to general enterprise customers.
Recognition as a leader in real-time revenue execution creates opportunities to expand into sales organizations that share telephony infrastructure with service teams, such as telecommunications companies and automotive dealerships.
Geographic expansion
International expansion is supported by data residency controls and real-time translation features that address regulatory and operational requirements in EMEA, LATAM, and APAC markets. Fast-growing Asian markets represent significant opportunities for AI-powered contact center solutions.
The company's partnerships with global system integrators and contact center platforms provide distribution channels for international growth without requiring extensive local sales infrastructure in each geography.
Risks
Platform consolidation: Contact center platforms like Genesys, NICE, and Talkdesk are bundling AI coaching features directly into their core offerings at zero marginal cost, potentially commoditizing standalone AI solutions and forcing overlay vendors to compete primarily on price rather than functionality.
Model commoditization: As large language models become more accessible and real-time conversation analysis becomes table stakes, Cresta's core differentiators around response speed and coaching accuracy may erode, reducing pricing power and making it harder to justify premium positioning against integrated alternatives.
Enterprise procurement: Large enterprises increasingly prefer single-vendor solutions for contact center infrastructure, creating headwinds for best-of-breed AI tools that require separate procurement processes, integration work, and vendor management compared to bundled platform offerings.
News
DISCLAIMERS
This report is for information purposes only and is not to be used or considered as an offer or the solicitation of an offer to sell or to buy or subscribe for securities or other financial instruments. Nothing in this report constitutes investment, legal, accounting or tax advice or a representation that any investment or strategy is suitable or appropriate to your individual circumstances or otherwise constitutes a personal trade recommendation to you.
This research report has been prepared solely by Sacra and should not be considered a product of any person or entity that makes such report available, if any.
Information and opinions presented in the sections of the report were obtained or derived from sources Sacra believes are reliable, but Sacra makes no representation as to their accuracy or completeness. Past performance should not be taken as an indication or guarantee of future performance, and no representation or warranty, express or implied, is made regarding future performance. Information, opinions and estimates contained in this report reflect a determination at its original date of publication by Sacra and are subject to change without notice.
Sacra accepts no liability for loss arising from the use of the material presented in this report, except that this exclusion of liability does not apply to the extent that liability arises under specific statutes or regulations applicable to Sacra. Sacra may have issued, and may in the future issue, other reports that are inconsistent with, and reach different conclusions from, the information presented in this report. Those reports reflect different assumptions, views and analytical methods of the analysts who prepared them and Sacra is under no obligation to ensure that such other reports are brought to the attention of any recipient of this report.
All rights reserved. All material presented in this report, unless specifically indicated otherwise is under copyright to Sacra. Sacra reserves any and all intellectual property rights in the report. All trademarks, service marks and logos used in this report are trademarks or service marks or registered trademarks or service marks of Sacra. Any modification, copying, displaying, distributing, transmitting, publishing, licensing, creating derivative works from, or selling any report is strictly prohibited. None of the material, nor its content, nor any copy of it, may be altered in any way, transmitted to, copied or distributed to any other party, without the prior express written permission of Sacra. Any unauthorized duplication, redistribution or disclosure of this report will result in prosecution.