UJET, a San Francisco-based company that sells AI-powered contact centre technology, has acquired Spiral, a Seattle startup specialising in customer conversation analysis, marking another consolidation in the competitive customer service technology sector as companies race to integrate advanced AI capabilities into their platforms.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed, though the acquisition brings together UJET’s cloud contact centre infrastructure with Spiral’s conversational analytics technology designed to automatically identify patterns and issues across customer communications.
Spiral will operate as “Spiral by UJET,” continuing to support its existing customers as a standalone offering whilst also integrating into UJET’s cloud contact centre platform. This dual approach allows current Spiral customers to maintain their existing workflows whilst UJET customers gain access to enhanced analytics capabilities embedded within the broader platform.
Founded in 2018 by former Amazon engineers Elena Zhizhimontova and Andrew DiLosa, Spiral developed AI technology that automatically detects and categorises issues raised across phone calls, chats, emails, surveys and social media. The platform is designed to help companies uncover product defects and support problems by analysing patterns in customer feedback that might not be apparent through manual review or traditional quality assurance processes.
Spiral’s customer roster includes Owlet, a manufacturer of baby monitoring devices; Whitepages, which provides contact information services; and Turo, a peer-to-peer car sharing platform. These diverse companies demonstrate Spiral’s applicability across industries with distinct customer service challenges, from parents concerned about infant safety to individuals verifying contact information to vehicle owners managing rental experiences.
“UJET’s acquisition of Spiral will provide businesses with a unified view of all customer conversations for more proactive, personalised service,” UJET CEO Vasili Triant stated, articulating the strategic rationale for combining operational contact centre management with deeper conversation analytics.
Spiral previously raised nearly $7 million from investors including Trilogy Equity Partners, Bezos Expeditions, Techstars, Alumni Ventures Group, Ensemble, and the Alexa Fund. The startup has fewer than 10 employees, all of whom will join UJET as part of the acquisition. Zhizhimontova will assume the role of vice president of applied AI, positioning her to lead integration of Spiral’s technology into UJET’s broader platform whilst continuing development of conversational analytics capabilities.
The acquisition reflects the advantages that come from Amazon engineering pedigrees in the customer service technology sector. Zhizhimontova and DiLosa’s experience at Amazon, a company legendary for its customer obsession and sophisticated machine learning infrastructure, provided technical expertise and credibility that helped Spiral attract venture capital and enterprise customers despite competing in a crowded market where numerous startups apply AI to customer feedback analysis.
Amazon’s investments in natural language processing, sentiment analysis, and customer feedback systems created an environment where engineers developed deep expertise in understanding customer communications at scale. The company processes millions of customer contacts daily across multiple channels, requiring sophisticated systems to identify emerging issues, prioritise critical problems, and route feedback to appropriate teams. Zhizhimontova and DiLosa carried this expertise to Spiral, building technology that helps companies without Amazon’s resources achieve similar insights from their customer conversations.
The technology’s ability to operate across multiple communication channels addresses a fundamental challenge facing modern businesses where customer feedback arrives through fragmented touchpoints. A customer might call support with a product issue, later tweet about the same problem, then complete a survey expressing frustration. Without systems connecting these data points, companies lack complete understanding of customer experiences and may miss patterns indicating systemic problems requiring urgent attention.
Traditional quality assurance processes in contact centres involve manual review of small samples of customer interactions, typically evaluating whether agents followed procedures and treated customers professionally. Whilst important for training and compliance, this approach cannot identify broader patterns across thousands or millions of conversations that might reveal product defects, confusing user interfaces, inadequate documentation, or service gaps causing repeated customer frustration.
Spiral’s AI-powered approach analyses all customer interactions rather than samples, automatically categorising issues, tracking frequency and severity, and surfacing trends that might not be apparent to human reviewers examining individual conversations. This comprehensive analysis enables companies to shift from reactive problem-solving, where issues are addressed only after escalating to crisis levels, toward proactive identification and resolution of emerging problems before they affect large customer populations.
The integration into UJET’s platform creates value for both companies’ customer bases. Existing UJET customers gain access to sophisticated analytics previously requiring separate vendor relationships, whilst Spiral customers benefit from being part of a larger platform with broader capabilities and presumably greater resources for continued product development and customer support.
