Benzinga | Aug 31, 2021 08:17AM EDT

Avaya Reports Strategic Investment In Journey.Ai, No Terms Disclosed

Avaya Holdings Corp. (NYSE:AVYA) today announced it has made a strategic investment in Journey.Ai, Inc., developer of a digital trusted identity platform focusing on enhancing privacy, security, and customer experience. Based in Denver, Colorado, Journey is a part of the Avaya DevConnect partner ecosystem. The Journey digital trusted identity platform, integrated with Avaya OneCloud(tm) CCaaS (Contact Center as a Service) offerings, enables enterprises to interact and transact with customers in a secure and simple manner.

With its use of multi-modal biometric technologies, including facial and voice authentication, Journey can confirm customer identity with 99.9999% accuracy in less than two seconds. Journey's patented Zero Knowledge(tm) Network gives Avaya OneCloud CCaaS customers the unique ability to digitally request information from their customers, from Personal Identifiable Information (PII) to payments to electronic signatures. This patented technique routes the information to back-office systems to be verified and acted on before returning the results back to the contact center agents or specific applications and revealing only the need-to-know details.

"Journey's innovation in Zero Knowledge, coupled with core Avaya Contact Center offerings address critical components of the customer experience along with the privacy and security requirements faced by contact centers," said David Austin, Avaya GVP of Corporate Development. "This strategic investment in an ecosystem partner enhances key security capabilities for our global customers, and is bringing additional industry-leading innovation into the Avaya OneCloud platform."

"To combat the increase in data breaches and identity theft, the Avaya OneCloud Platform provides an ideal solution to leverage and orchestrate trusted identity throughout the customer journey across blended channels and devices to improve the customer experience," said Brett Shockley, Co-Founder and CEO of Journey. "By verifying a customer through flexible biometrics, rather than relying on passwords like their favorite pizza topping or high school mascot, we have an opportunity to simultaneously fight fraud and customer friction in the contact center."

The terms of the transaction were not disclosed. The transaction closed this month and is not expected to have a material financial impact for the current quarter.