Lemonade vendor Rasa raises $26 million

San Francisco-based AI infrastructure developer Rasa announced a $26 Million Series B financing round led by Andreessen Horowitz and including participation from the firm’s Cultural Leadership Fund, a strategic fund designed to bring African American cultural leaders onto the cap tables of new technology companies. Existing investors Accel, 468 Capital, Basis Set Ventures, and Mango Capital also participated in the round. This brings Rasa’s total funding to $40 million.

Founded in 2016, Rasa which now tops 3 million downloads, is an open source conversational AI company for enterprises looking to incorporate chatbots in their business. It supplies the standard infrastructure for conversational AI, providing the tools required to build contextual assistants.

Rasa is used by developers working in organizations of every size, including within six of the top ten banks in the world, five of the largest ten global telecommunications firms, and five of the 10 largest insurance companies. According to its site, Lemonade is a client.

Unlike “many chatbot companies provide ‘black box’ technology and simple drag & drop interfaces,” Rasa believes that NLP research, machine learning, and flexible infrastructure are required to develop great conversational AI applications.