Contact centers today wrestle with multifaceted operational challenges that impact their ability to deliver consistent, high-quality customer experiences. These range from managing high employee turnover and extensive training requirements to maintaining service quality across channels, integrating complex technology systems, ensuring regulatory compliance, and optimizing performance metrics—all while keeping costs in check. Recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence have created unprecedented opportunities for customer-centric businesses to address these longstanding challenges through enhanced efficiency and personalization. Regal, operating as the intersection of AI and customer, combines autonomous agents with AI-powered contact center software for human agents. The company’s comprehensive solution covers all communication channels—including text, email, phone, chat, and video—to drive improvements across sales, support, and customer retention. By leveraging sophisticated tools that can replace existing stacks or be integrated alongside, Regal is fundamentally shifting contact centers from cost centers to revenue generators, delivering concrete results including triple the answer rates and 25% revenue growth through strategic automation and personalization.
AlleyWatch caught up with Regal Cofounder and CEO Alex Levin to learn more about the inspiration for the business, the company’s strategic plans, latest round of funding, which brings the company’s total funding raised to $82.1M, and much, much more…
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
We raised $40M from Emergence Capital (lead), Founder Collective, Homebrew, Operator Collective, Inspired, Flex Capital, Entrée Capital, and Frontline Ventures.
Tell us about the product or service that Regal offers.
Regal is the new standard in AI-powered CX – we offer both autonomous AI Agents, and AI-powered contact center software for human agents.
What inspired the start of Regal?
My cofounder, Rebecca Greene, and I have worked together for a long time. We previously helped scale Handy and then Angi (the entity created by the merger of Handy, Angie’s List, and HomeAdvisor) for six years. It was our experience bringing complex home services online that led us to realize the shortcomings of the legacy contact center model and contact center software – namely, its propensity to treat every customer interaction as a cost and using one-size-fits-all solutions instead of reaching the right customer with the right message at the right time. We started Regal to reimagine the core contact center software from the ground up, with the customer at the center.
How is Regal different?
Unlike legacy contact center software, Regal understands real-time customer intent signals and uses a blend of Regal AI Agents and your human agents to deliver personalized interactions.
Based on the rate of improvement of our GenAI Agents, we believe that 10 years from now the majority of contact center interactions will be autonomous, so we are all in on helping contact centers transition from human agents to AI Agents.
What market does Regal target and how big is it?
Regal sells to two segments of the contact center market. Our software for human agents targets the $40B CCaaS market, and our AI Agents target the $400B contact center labor market.
What’s your business model?
Regal charges SaaS and usage fees for our CCaaS product. And our AI Agents are priced per minute of usage.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
We have a point of view that is contrarian but right. Most people believe that voice/calls are dying and customer support is only a cost center. But we believe that contact centers are a revenue engine for companies, and a personal touch over a call is critical to the success of many businesses.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
We are excited to move ~20% of our customers’ calls from human agents to AI Agents.
Where do you see the company going in the near term?
We believe in consumer brands using a personal touch in an increasingly digital world. And we think the key to perfecting (cost-efficient) personal touches is to use data + AI + a culture of continuous improvement. So we continue to invest in real-time data infrastructure, GenAI Agents, and tools for A/B testing to help our customers better engage and retain their customers using their contact center.
What’s your favorite fall destination in and around the city?
Flatiron. I grew up in an apartment in Flatiron long before it was a nice area, and our office is only a block from there so it’s been amazing to watch the transformation.
