In Conversation with Surbhi Rathore, CEO and Co-founder
Surbhi Rathore is the CEO and co-founder of Symbl.ai.
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Updated November 2026. This was first published on 21 November 2022. The idea is the same. Any number below is what the original piece said then. It is not a new count. This is a record of a conversation from that day. No new quotes were added.
Key takeaways
- Surbhi Rathore is the CEO and co-founder of Symbl.ai.
- Symbl.ai is bringing to life her vision for a programmable platform that empowers developers and businesses to monitor, act, and comply with voice, video conversations at scale in their products and workflows without building their in-house data science expertise.
- This Techstars alum co-founded Symbl.ai almost 3 years ago and is now backed by Amazon and has raised an early-stage venture round of $6.5M which deployed capital to grow a global team of tech enthusiasts to more than 50 people.
Surbhi Rathore is the CEO and co-founder of Symbl.ai.
Symbl.ai is bringing to life her vision for a programmable platform that empowers developers and businesses to monitor, act, and comply with voice, video conversations at scale in their products and workflows without building their in-house data science expertise.
This Techstars alum co-founded Symbl.ai almost 3 years ago and is now backed by Amazon and has raised an early-stage venture round of $6.5M which deployed capital to grow a global team of tech enthusiasts to more than 50 people. She comes with experience from technical and customer-obsessed roles in both startups and enterprises such as Nevis Networks and Amdocs. Before co-founding Symbl.ai, she worked in the Conversational AI space with a focus on delivering value to Telecommunication users. Surbhi is an international tech leader who advocates for Women in AI with a personal mission to inspire more women to work in Data Science. She is a national speaker, and accessibility equity champion, and the ultimate adventure capitalist. Surbhi has been honored with the Women in Voice Award for Founder of the Year, Amazon’s Top 10 Women to Watch in 2020, and the Will Reed Top 50 Companies in 2021.
Q: Let’s start with what is Symbl.ai? #
is an API-first Conversation Intelligence platform that enables developers to analyze, monitor, comply and act on the voice, video, or text conversations in their products or workflows. We like to refer to ourselves as “Conversation-as-a-Service’’ that empowers businesses to build next-generation communication experiences and unlock the potential of conversation data without investing heavily in building the AI/ML infrastructure.
Q: What excites you most about conversational intelligence and what inspired you to start #
I have always been interested in building software products and platforms that operate with conversations at scale. I have seen firsthand so much information and knowledge getting lost and not used rightly as a function for the growth of businesses. I am passionate about making this technology accessible to more builders so that we can push the boundaries of the adoption of conversation intelligence in the ecosystem and generate shared knowledge.
Q: Could you talk about Symbl.ai’s patented context understanding engine, and how it helps #
Symbl.ai is a one-of-its-only-kind end-to-end conversation intelligence platform built to use our patented context understanding engine. The platform works with multi-channel data i.e., voice, text, and audio to provide what it can do like sentiment analysis, action items, topics, trackers, summary, and much more. We also offer several speech-to-text what it can do like transcription, speaker separation, and speaker diarization in real-time as conversations happen or after they are completed.
Symbl.ai stands out from the rest because we provide solutions for simple and complex use-cases alike. Our out-of-the-box solutions such as action items, follow-ups, topics, questions, speech-to-text, can be used upfront while our programmable features such as trackers and conversation groups can be optimized to suit complex implementations tailored to a specific domain or use-case.
Q: How can companies benefit from solutions like Symbl.ai? #
Symbl.ai offers a suite of APIs that help companies build their own low-cost call tracking, compliance, and coaching solutions at a scale that they can go live in just 2 weeks!
companies that have huge business conversation data that is unstructured and unruly, can benefit largely from Symbl.ai. to search and index conversations, moderate content, redact, comply and detect profanity, understand characteristics for coaching, track conversation characteristics and automate workflows.
Q: According to you, what is the future of conversational intelligence? #
We’re at the dawn of conversational intelligence and only just scratching the surface. There’s tremendous potential in how human conversations will be used to bring in predictability and automation in solutions that have a very personal touch.
Q: Since conversational intelligence is an emerging technology, what are the challenges in #
Human conversations are by nature messy. The biggest challenge has been to understand underlying patterns, recognize anomalies, and design models that can intuitively understand the context and extract insights that have business value.
Building a context-aware platform that works horizontally on any conversation while enabling developers to build their own domain-specific intelligence was the key here. Working with early customers and involving feedback loop as part of the early product development lifecycle, specifically for emerging technologies is one of the key factors in iteratively getting to product-market fit.
Q: What is the current growth of the company and existing customer base? #
Surbhi: We opened our platform in general availability last year mid-covid that also led to the fueling the adoption of digital communications and what comes beyond. We are excited to work with thousands of developers building on our platform and trusted by businesses from small startups to enterprises like Yac, Airmeet, Racket, Intermedia, SpectrumVoip, and many more.
Q. How do you see Symbl.ai’s future and its growth? #
We plan to become the operating system for the modern communication stack. With our end-to-end, context-aware conversation analytics and management platform, Symbl is set to become the intelligent workflow automation engine for the language-enabled enterprise.
Q: Which of the few (three of four) emerging technologies do you find the most promising a #
Also to speech and NLP which are my core passion areas, I am excited to follow the maturity and adoption of VR and wearable technologies. I look forward to conversation intelligence at an intersection of these emerging tech.
Q: Can you share some tips for young entrepreneurs? #
Marketing in the early stages of the company can be hugely valuable - get a marketing co-founder. Invest in building your content engine early and share your hypothesis out there. There is so much value in pushing your knowledge out there early - it will only come back!
Q: What is the best way to get in touch with the Symbl.ai team and learn more? #
You can follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn or directly write to me - . I am always happy to huddle and discuss use cases, brainstorm implementations for your voice-enabled experiences. We also have an active community on Slack for one-and-all. Please feel free to join us here: https://symbldotai.slack.com/ssb/redirect#/.
Questions and answers #
Q: Let’s start with what is Symbl.ai? #
is an API-first Conversation Intelligence platform that enables developers to analyze, monitor, comply and act on the voice, video, or text conversations in their products or workflows.
Q: How can companies benefit from solutions like Symbl.ai? #
Symbl.ai offers a suite of APIs that help companies build their own low-cost call tracking, compliance, and coaching solutions at a scale that they can go live in just 2 weeks!. companies that have huge business conversation data that is unstructured and unruly, can benefit largely from Symbl.ai.
Q: According to you, what is the future of conversational intelligence? #
We’re at the dawn of conversational intelligence and only just scratching the surface. There’s tremendous potential in how human conversations will be used to bring in predictability and automation in solutions that have a very personal touch.
Q: What is the current growth of the company and existing customer base? #
Surbhi: We opened our platform in general availability last year mid-covid that also led to the fueling the adoption of digital communications and what comes beyond.