New York-based Glia, an omnichannel customer service platform for financial services companies, announced that it recently raised $20 million in a Series B round led by Insight Partners.

Lonne Jaffe, Managing Director at Insight, told Bank Innovation that the New York-based VC firm was most impressed by Glia’s blend of technology, which includes co-browsing, video chat, voice communication, and a machine learning-powered chatbot chassis.

“There is a natural bundle here,” said Jaffe, who is joining Glia’s board as part of Insight’s investment. “In a world where you can do things like have messaging and co-browsing and chatbots and video all integrated into one system, which also has the ability to integrate with your CRM system, is pretty compelling.”

Dan Michaeli, co-founder and CEO of Glia, told Bank Innovation that almost every interaction between businesses and customers today involves a screen, yet the main method for getting in touch remains an old-fashioned phone call. He said Glia aims to augment the human touch with its digital omnichannel functionality.

He said companies that move from phone-first to digital-first communication over the next few years will be the big winners when it comes to customer experience.

“The challenges banks are facing today are in transformation and digitizing old processes,” Michaeli said. “So many areas of banking are trying to get processes to a digital modality.”

Fresh off a rebrand from its former name, SaleMove, Glia plans to expand its product development, sales, solutions, and marketing teams, and to improve the platform’s capabilities.

“We originally focused on sales use cases and as we grew and acquired more customers, we realized that our customers were using the platform in a variety of ways, broadly speaking, across sales and servicing,” Michaeli said. “We realized that the problem we were tackling was much larger than what we thought.”

The goal now is to help financial institutions to achieve cohesion and multimodality in all the ways they interact with customers.

Michaeli said Glia’s differentiator is the migration path it provides its clients and their customers, by allowing them to switch from voice to video to chat to co-browsing, seamlessly.

“We’ve created an experience of being able to go from the highest touch to the lowest touch engagement all within the same interface,” Michaeli said.

He said the platform’s co-browsing function, which allows bankers to pop into their customers’ browser sessions and help navigate them through complicated tasks such as filling out a mortgage application, is “second to none.”

Glia’s clients include Deutsche Bank, Berkshire Hathaway, UnitedHeathcare and Bank of the West.

For the third straight year, Glia saw a more than doubling of annual recurring revenue across its customer base.

Major product additions last year included Glia’s Voice Platform, through which customers connect with businesses using digital voice rather than legacy phone numbers.

Another was Glia’s AI Management Platform, which enables companies to integrate and manage chatbots from multiple partners, such as Amazon Lex, Google Dialogflow and IBM Watson. Michaeli said this management layer allows businesses to treat chatbots like human agents by easily evaluating performance with standard metrics/data and creating chatbot teams.

Jaffe said companies can go all in with Glia and potentially replace “a huge amount of very expensive, decrepit legacy systems, in the telecom space, for example.” But he also said they don’t have to start there.

“The initial sale or the initial usage of the product doesn’t have to be this kind of boiling-the-ocean, huge project,” he said. “It can be a very lightweight digital transformation initiative that has a nice wow factor to it.”