Kore.ai opens Bay Area headquarters in growth push

Kore.ai has established a strategic headquarters in the San Francisco Bay Area, adding a base in a region central to artificial intelligence investment and hiring.

Its official headquarters will remain in Orlando, where the company was founded, and it will continue to maintain a significant presence in New York and other cities worldwide.

The Bay Area expansion comes as Kore.ai reports rapid customer growth, broader partnerships with major cloud providers and a new round of senior hiring. In its last fiscal year, it added more than 100 enterprise customers globally and now counts more than 500 Global 2000 companies and partners among its users and partners.

The company is also shifting key engineering, Forward Deployed Engineering and go-to-market staff to the Bay Area office. It has appointed Uma Sandilya as Chief Growth Officer, Cathal McCarthy as Chief Strategy Officer and Peter Mullen as Chief Marketing Officer.

According to Kore.ai, Sandilya was previously a partner at McKinsey and held a role at C3.ai. McCarthy brings more than 25 years of experience, including roles at Apple and eBay, while Mullen has worked on brand building for large corporations and AI businesses.

Growth push

Kore.ai is seeking to strengthen its position in the crowded market for business-focused artificial intelligence software, where suppliers are trying to move customers beyond trials and into broader deployment. It says it has delivered large production-scale installations in customer service and employee productivity use cases.

Recent commercial momentum has also been tied to larger technology partners. Over the last fiscal year, Kore.ai deepened ties with Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, including serving as a launch partner for Microsoft Agent 365 and securing the AWS Advanced AI Competency designation.

Those relationships reflect a broader effort by software providers to align with cloud groups that many large companies already use for data and computing infrastructure. Such alliances can support distribution, integration and credibility with large corporate buyers.

Kore.ai also secured growth capital from AllianceBernstein Private Credit Investors, which it said would support product development and international expansion.

Product focus

Kore.ai has been building a portfolio focused on customer service, employee tools and process automation. It recently introduced its Agent Management Platform, or AMP, which it describes as a central system for governing, monitoring and managing AI agents and AI systems across a business.

The company also operates an agent marketplace and says its platform supports both no-code and pro-code development. That reflects a broader shift in the software market as suppliers try to appeal both to business teams seeking faster deployment and to technical teams wanting more control over integration and customisation.

Kore.ai says its approach is model-, data-, cloud- and application-agnostic, a position that may appeal to large companies reluctant to commit to a single provider as the artificial intelligence market evolves quickly.

Industry standing

Kore.ai said its recent performance has been recognised in more than 12 industry rankings and assessments, including Gartner Magic Quadrant for Conversational AI Platforms, Forrester Wave for Cognitive Search Platforms and Everest Group PEAK Matrix for Agentic AI Products.

Competition in the sector remains intense, with specialist software groups, established enterprise software vendors and cloud platform operators all competing for corporate spending on AI tools. In that environment, a physical presence in the Bay Area still carries weight for companies looking to recruit senior talent, build partner networks and stay close to product and investment trends.

Founder and CEO Raj Koneru linked the move to those aims. "The Bay Area represents the epicenter of AI innovation and enterprise technology transformation," he said. "Establishing our strategic headquarters here allows us to be closer to our customers, partners, and the broader ecosystem shaping the future of AI. It strengthens our ability to innovate faster, collaborate more deeply, and deliver cutting-edge, enterprise-grade AI solutions at a global scale."