2026.09.24 | TB | Software | Regal.ai Expert

Primer • 8 Sep 2026

Companies: FIVN US

Expert Former Senior Executive in Sales & Marketing

Esha Patel (Analyst) — Third Bridge Sector Analyst

Agenda

• Over 14 years’ experience in the software space
• Over one year of experience at Regal.ai (left within the last two years)

Introduction

Analyst: Please could you state I agree or I disagree to the following statement. You understand the definition of material non-public information and agree not to disclose any such information, or any other information which is confidential, during the Primer Interview today.

Expert: I agree.

Questions

Can you describe what Regal.ai does and its products and services?

Expert: Regal is a contact centre solution that helps companies build a full infrastructure for customer support and service.

Analyst: Is it a proprietary platform?

Expert: Yes. Primarily through telephone and SMS.

What is Regal.ai's value proposition?

Expert: They are built with a very simple drag-and-drop workflow that requires very little dev work. Companies are able to build a much more customisable flow of the contact centre and have a much easier time building customer service workflows than they would using a legacy platform like Genesys or Five9.

What is the full range of industries and business sizes that could use Regal.ai?

Expert: They can typically serve the mid-market and enterprise. They can't usually work with super large enterprises. I would say pretty squarely within mid-market and small enterprise across a pretty wide range of industries. Healthcare, local services, which means construction, manufacturing, education, a little bit of e-commerce, a little bit of legal services and a little bit of insurance, healthcare, financial services.

Analyst: Why do you think Regal can't work with large companies or enterprises?

Expert: I believe the governance and security within the platform is not up to code on what certain large enterprise brands require. There have been a number of, for example, government use cases that the company has been unable to take on for that reason as well.

Can you profile Regal.ai's typical target customers within the range of industries and business sizes? Are there any customer names of the company that are in the public domain?

Expert: Toyota is a customer, but it's not all of Toyota. It's like Toyota's insurance branch. That's a good example. Toyota is a huge enterprise customer, but they don't support Toyota's entire contact centre. They support a portion of Toyota. Same with AAA. AAA is obviously a huge insurance company, but they support a portion of it. Then, there are smaller, if you take a lot of legacy industries like insurance, if you think of the newer players in those industries, they support those. Kin and EHealth are two newer players in very legacy industries. Those are two good examples. Ethos is another newer insurance player that they support. They have some more traditional type of brands like American Red Cross, Mutual of Omaha, that type of thing.

Analyst: What percentage of Regal's revenue does it get from healthcare services?

Expert: There are a couple of very big companies that are in healthcare. I would say 21-30% comes from healthcare.

Analyst: How does the remaining 71-80% of Regal's revenue split up?

Expert: I would say 41-50% is insurance and the remainder is the rest of the verticals, probably evenly split.

Analyst: What is the third industry Regal caters to the most besides insurance and healthcare?

Expert: Probably financial services.

Analyst: What percentage of Regal's revenue would you attribute to the financial services industry?

Expert: I would say maybe 0-10%.

Analyst: What would you say is Regal's sweet spot in ideal customer size?

Expert: In terms of employee count, I would say 5,000-10,000 employees.

What are the key regions Regal derives revenue from?

Expert: United States and Canada.

What percentage of Regal's revenue might be coming from the US and Canada?

Expert: 91-100% [from the US]. [Canada], 0-10%.

Analyst: What might be Regal's top three states in the US?

Expert: They have quite a wide mix. I'm trying to think about an answer to this because a lot of these companies are based in weird places that you wouldn't expect. I would say California, just by virtue of a lot of companies being based there, would probably be number one. Then, it's really hard to pinpoint a second key region. California and New York are probably the top ones and it's hard to pinpoint another one after that. I would say Texas, probably.

What are Regal's core revenue-generating segments? What percentage of the company's revenue might be coming from each segment?

Expert: There's three parts of the product. There are AI agents. That is the core platform and there's the journey builder, which is part of the core platform. I would say the core platform is probably 71-80% of their business. The AI agents are what they're trying to really get off the ground and I would say that's currently probably 0-10%. I would say 11-20%. It's growing. The journey builder, I would say I think 21-30% of customers have it enabled, but their usage is low. It's not heavily adopted, but more and more customers have it enabled. It's just not heavily used, I guess. The third segment is the core platform. It's typically the Regal platform.

What is the typical revenue model for each segment – transactional, recurring or reoccurring?

Expert: The core platform is seat-based and it's recurring revenue. The journey builder is also recurring revenue and it's usage-based. The AI agents are usage-based AI. That's transactional.

Analyst: To confirm, might a customer just be doing one-off payments based on their need for AI agents?

Expert: There is a small platform fee, but some customers do use the AI agents without the core platform; it's very difficult to do that. You would have to be using it on top of a different contact centre, like a Five9 or Genesys. It's a very small percentage of customers that do that. If you're doing that, then it would be a transactional fee plus a platform fee that Regal would also charge you. If you are using Regal's core platform, then you're already paying that recurring fee, so then the AI agents would be purely transactional revenue.

Analyst: Might there be an MCD [minimum contract duration] for the core platform and journey builder segments?

Expert: Typically, the bare minimum would be one year, but most contracts are 2-3 years.

Analyst: How often might the customer be billed?

Expert: At a minimum, it would be quarterly, but most customers are billed annually.

Analyst: Might there be tiered packages or tiered subscriptions that might be offered, or is it just the one package that's offered to everyone?

Expert: They are tiered based on usage and based on what parts of the product people use. There's a lot of feature flags within the product. There are agent-specific tools within the product that some customers use and some customers don't use. There's a lot of bells and whistles within the product that are tiered out and flagged for different people.

Analyst: You mentioned the fees for the core platform based on the number of seats. Might that be the number of employees?

Expert: Number of agents.

Analyst: Might there be a minimum or maximum number of agents required?

Expert: The minimum is usually 500. Then, there is no maximum. I think where you hit the maximum is basically the maximum that Regal would be able to support, which I would say would be 50,000 and above is where the scale of it would get tricky.

Analyst: You mentioned the journey builder was based on usage. Could you share some more information on that?

Expert: The journey builder is basically imagine a Lucidchart where you're dragging and dropping workflows that are built for customer service use cases. Depending on how many journeys you're building, you are charged different amounts. Typically, it's like if you have up to 20, up to 40, up to 60, it's like a certain amount. If you have more, you're put into the next bucket and you're charged a different amount per journey based on how many are active and being used at once.

Analyst: Is there a potential for the payment to vary on each payment cycle?

Expert: Quarterly. Yes.

Analyst: Is the revenue model reoccurring since it is not the same payment each time?

Expert: Yes. The customer service team does a good job of helping people keep an eye on it. It's primarily done to prevent people from just having an unlimited number of journeys and not using them, essentially.

Analyst: Do the payments end up being the same anyway?

Expert: It'll be very infrequent, essentially. I have got to figure out how to explain this. It's like, if you're building journeys and no one is using them, then you're not really being billed for them. Because then it's just like a workflow that no customer is flowing through, so then you wouldn't be charged anyway. If people are being charged, if customers are going through the journey, then you will be charged. It doesn't end up really changing. It's more about the clutter that you're putting within your instance of the platform, if that makes sense.

What might be a use case for each core segment? Can you provide the end-to-end customer journey and why they use each segment? Let's start with the core platform.

Expert: The core platform would be you're an insurance brand who is on Genesys, a very old contact centre and your whole contact centre is on-prem and you are looking to modernise because everything is very slow. Your customers hate engaging with your brand and calling in. Every time you have to make changes, it requires a lot of IT and dev work and you're unable to keep up with the demand of inbound customer inquiries and requests. You would migrate your entire contact centre over to Regal. Regal would provide you with all of the tools, from your IVR, all of the telephony, the chats and the SMS tools needed to replace your entire contact centre. You would have the ability to run your entire contact centre in the cloud really seamlessly and easily, with very little IT or dev work using best-in-class tools that Regal offers. It would all be done seamlessly through sort of a business admin workflow and not through an IT workflow and it would all be cloud-based.

Analyst: Could you share some insights into a few integrations that are offered with the platform?

Expert: There are contact centre integrations. All the integrations that you would expect to have with older contact centres. There are Five9 integrations and things like that. There are also integrations with voice tools like ElevenLabs. If you're looking to use different voice technologies or different accents, things like that. There are other integrations with other voice tech tools like Balto Labs as well.

Analyst: Could you provide a use case for the journey builder segment?

Expert: Journey builder is you're an insurance company, but you want to treat people who are using your auto insurance vs your home insurance vs your travel insurance very differently. You have in a database all of the people's information and you have all that information segmented in a CSV file somewhere. You can create three separate journeys for those people. When they come in, you can set up individualised journeys for each of them so that when a travel insurance customer dials into your contact centre for support, they don't have to press one for travel insurance. They automatically go through the travel insurance flow because the contact centre recognises them as a travel insurance customer and they automatically get the proper information and journey built for them. They get taken through a specific flow and they only get information that is relevant for them. They automatically get routed to the right type of customer service agent for travel insurance. It minimises wastage in terms of being routed to the wrong person, misuse of resources, etc. It also allows the contact centre to better resource more accordingly because you have a better understanding of what volume looks like in each of your segments. You know exactly how many travel insurance agents you need vs auto insurance vs home insurance. It allows you to provide a better customer experience to those specific customers without them feeling like they have to do all of the work to get the right type of service that they need.

Analyst: Could you provide a use case for the AI agents?

Expert: This is a little bit more standard, but basically, you can use very human-like AI agents to handle repetitive, sort of low touch ask. Things like scheduling, appointment reminders, lead qualification, basic tasks. The AI agents can be set up via voice, SMS or live chat on the website and they can take action within Regal. They can shift appointment times. They can append records. They can change information on lead record types. They can actually take actions on the back end and customers can engage with them. They can also work alongside human agents. You could have an AI agent and a human agent sort of working together. The human agent can be asking the more difficult questions while the AI agent is updating the record in the background, so that, let's say, for insurance, you can't use an AI agent to sell insurance because they have to be licensed in a specific geography in order to sell insurance on the phone. In this use case, an AI agent can do all of the back-end work of appending the notes and doing all of the record-keeping so that the licensed insurance agent can have twice as many conversations in the same day. It can be an efficiency play as well.

Which of Regal's three segments do you anticipate being the fastest growing and potentially driving the largest share of revenue in future?

Expert: AI agents are the fastest growing. It has the potential to drive the largest amount of revenue. The core platform currently drives the largest amount of recurring revenue at the moment, but AI agents are the fastest growing.

Analyst: Might there be any rationale behind saying AI agents are the fastest-growing?

Expert: It is just the huge amount of adoption and a very well-built product. I think the fact that it can both accomplish net new use cases that companies didn't do before and it can help optimise existing human agents. Means that it's a universal use case for almost every ideal customer. I think every new customer that signs up for the core platform adds on AI agents. Because it is based on usage, the unit economics mean that the potential for high usage is unlimited. Whereas with the core platform, because it's based on seats, I don't think that there is a huge amount of potential for people to continue to grow the number of seats that are in the contact centre. I just think that's unlikely, but I think that we are seeing across the landscape people continuing to grow their AI usage.

Analyst: Is there any outsourcing involved or is everything done in-house, just in the service delivery, customer support and all of that?

Expert: Everything is done by a Regal team member. There are team members that are not based in the US, but everybody who works for Regal is a Regal employee.

What do you estimate Regal's NRR [net revenue retention] rate to be – less than 80%, 80-90%, 90-100% or higher?

Expert: I would say 100-110%.

What do you think the key drivers of Regal's NRR are likely to be?

Expert: The first is that it's very difficult to replace your contact centre, so it's a highly sticky product category. It's just extremely sticky. Once people do switch, it's hard to replace. The second is a very high-touch customer service model. The third a very well-built, well-architected product.

Could you specify the industry that best describes Regal's core operations?

Expert: I would say CCaaS, contact-centre-as-a-service.

What has the CCaaS [contact-centre-as-a-service] industry's AAGR been over the past three years – less than 0%, 0-5%, 6-10%, 11-20% or greater than 20%?

Expert: If you're looking at it without AI, I would say probably 11-20%. If you're looking at it with AI, it's greater than 20%.

What do you think have been the 1-2 key drivers of industry growth over the past three years?

Expert: I would say AI agents have been a big one. AI customer service agents have been the primary one. The second has been sort of an AI copilot. Driving greater efficiency from human agents with AI optimisation.

What do you think the market's AAGR will be over the next three years?

Expert: I would say greater than 20%.

What do you think will be the growth drivers of the market in future?

Expert: We're seeing an increased push where people want to decrease the number of humans that they have on their customer service teams. The vast majority of companies want to minimise the number of humans working in their contact centres and their service teams. I think people will look towards solutions that can provide them with AI agents to do that.

I think, up until, I would say, mid-2025, AI voice agents, in particular, were not at the quality where they could fully replicate human conversations. They were good enough to replace an IVR, but they were not good enough to actually conduct a two-way conversation. The latency was too high and they were not responsive or fast enough to be able to replicate a human. That has really changed over the last 12 months. As that has changed, I think that now almost every company within Regal's ICP is considering a future over the next 24-36 months where they have very few humans operating within their customer service teams or their contact centres. I think that almost every company within Regal's ICP will reserve probably 10% of their headcount for extreme use cases that require a high touch, like escalations and very specific edge cases that require a human. Then, the remainder of that headcount will be repurposed into solutions like Regal for AI agents and that will be the bulk of the customer service delivery.

What would you estimate the adoption rate to be for CCaaS software across the market?

Expert: The adoption for contact centre solutions is 80-90% of companies have a contact centre solution. If we're talking about an AI contact centre solution, I would say it's 40-50%.

Analyst: I think we have been speaking about the AI benefit as well.

Expert: Yes.

To what degree do you think the industry is correlated to economic cyclicality? Is it counter-cyclical, very cyclical, somewhat cyclical, somewhat resilient or resilient? Why?

Expert: I would say it's pretty resilient, somewhat resilient. I think every company has to have a contact centre solution once you have achieved a certain scale. Especially in Regal's ICP, these are high-dependency categories, insurance, local services, healthcare, financial services. For consumers, they expect these vendors in their lives to be able to have a phone number where they can call. These companies will always need a contact centre solution of some kind. I think as a result, it's not like a product category that, no matter how bad the economic situation is for these companies, they can't just not have a phone number. They will always need to have a contact centre and that, mixed with the fact that replacing your contact centre is extremely difficult, time-consuming and laborious. The change management is extremely high. I think it makes the general space pretty resilient economically.

Based on public information, what impactful technological evolutions or innovations should we anticipate over the next few years?

Expert: I think the voice technology for AI agents will continue to get better. I think WebRTC will also be a big one. Right now, the bulk of voice AI agents exists within a phone number where brands or companies will put a phone number on their website and consumers will call in. Once WebRTC technology improves, there will likely be a button within an app or on a website where customers don't have to call into a phone number. They can just click a button to chat with an agent.

Are there any downside risks that might impact the industry's growth over the next three years?

Expert: There is talk of legislation around voice AI. In the current presidential administration, I believe it's been put on hold. I don't think that we will see any regulation within this current administration, but I think it'll probably resurface in the next one. If there is regulation around voice AI, particularly for regulated categories like insurance or healthcare or financial services, that has the ability to greatly impact where AI agents can be used and that has the ability to disrupt this industry.

How fragmented do you consider the CCaaS industry to be? Would you say it's a monopoly? Does it have 2-5 strong players? Is it fragmented or highly fragmented?

Expert: I don't think it's super fragmented. I think there are 2-5 strong players.

What are Regal.ai's top three competitors?

Expert: Five9 is one, followed by Retell AI. Talkdesk. Those are probably the main ones.

What are Regal.ai, Five9, Talkdesk and Retell AI's market shares, in percentage ranges? We can even rank them against each other.

Expert: I would say Five9 is probably number one. Talkdesk is probably number two. Retell is probably number three. Regal is four.

What were Regal.ai, Talkdesk and Retell AI's revenues for the last financial year in USD 100m ranges? Five9 is a publicly traded company.

Expert: Regal is probably USD 0-50m. Talkdesk would be USD 400m-500m. Retell, I think they raised this year. I would say it's probably USD 50m-100m. They're growing very quickly.

What were Regal.ai, Talkdesk and Retell AI's revenue growth rates for the last financial year – less than 0%, 0%, 0-5%, 6-10%, 11-20% or greater than 20%?

Expert: Regal is over 20%. Talkdesk, I would say maybe 11-20%. Retell, I would say, is greater than 20%.

What has been Regal.ai, Five9, Talkdesk and Retell AI's growth driver? Has the growth been organic, acquisition-based or mixed over the last year?

Expert: Organic for Regal. Five9 is mixed. Talkdesk is organic. Retell is also organic.

In your opinion, what is the average EBITDA for the players mentioned?

Expert: It's hard to say. I would put it right in the middle. [21-30%].

Would you say that each player's EBITDA is above, below or in line with the 21-30% industry average?

Expert: I would say on industry [for Regal]. Five9, I believe, is above industry. Talkdesk is on industry. Retell is above industry.

How do you think the players differentiate themselves, starting with Regal.ai?

Expert: Five9, I would say it's the scope of the product catalogue. For Talkdesk, it's ease of use and simplicity of pricing and simplicity of implementation. For Retell, it's the innovation and fast delivery of new AI features.

Analyst: Can you outline examples of AI features that Retell offers?

Expert: They are always first to market with new voice AI features. They have the lowest voice latency. They are always the fastest to ship new voices. They're typically the fastest with AI optimisation and new AI copilot features for agents. They have built a lot of AI bells and whistles into the product. The product is also more AI-forward, so they have a lot of AI reporting and control panel tools for business users that allow them to better understand how the product is working. I would say just a very innovative product.

Analyst: You mentioned Five9 differentiates because of its product catalogue. Could you share an example?

Expert: They just have a wide scope of what they offer. They have a contact centre, but they also have workforce engagement stuff for agents. They have supervisor tools for agents. They have performance management stuff for agents. They have multiple types of AI assistance that can help human agents. They have a full cloud migration, a secondary platform to help people move from on-prem to cloud. They have built a very wide platform. I think that's why they have good enterprise usage is because it's like they have built a moat around each of their offerings that is wide so that they kind of can cover the full gamut for enterprise customers.

Analyst: How does Regal differentiate itself on the products it offers?

Expert: The contact centre product, like the core platform, is, I would say, the best in the market. It is the simplest to use, the most customisable and the product itself works really well. It's like a simple product executed very well. The raw contact centre itself is better than Five9's contact centre or Talkdesk's or Retell's. It doesn't have the mode of kind of flashy things around it, but the actual contact centre itself is the best-performing contact centre.

Analyst: How does Talkdesk differentiate in products besides pricing?

Expert: They differentiate by having a lot of agent-focused features. I think Talkdesk is known for being a product for companies that have a lot of human agents still. There are still companies, largely in local services and insurance, that are still really betting big on humans. I think that will change as time continues, but there are still companies that have a large human workforce of people who are on the phone. They have the most tools that are still built for humans and they do have AI features and do have AI agents as well. I think it's table stakes now, but they have built the most tools for humans.

What do you think are customers' top three KPC [key purchasing criteria]? How do they rank by importance?

Expert: I think customisability to existing data. People want to be able to pull in their existing datasets and customer data. I think ease of use, like day-to-day operations. Then, I would say now, AI agents.

How important do you think price is to customers in the market? Why?

Expert: I think it is somewhat commoditised. I think pricing has largely flattened out and everybody knows everybody else's pricing. I think that most players in the space have largely evened out their pricing with one another.

What is the industry average churn rate for CCaaS software solutions – 0-5%, 6-10%, 11-15%, 16-20% or higher?

Expert: Low. I would say 6-10%.

How is Regal's churn rate compared to the industry average? Is it above, below or in line with the industry?

Expert: In line.

What do you think has been the key driver of Regal's historical growth? Was there a specific strategy the company implemented, or was there a specific channel it went aggressively on?

Expert: Yes. Referrals from existing customers, focusing really hard on a few verticals early on. I think going really deep on insurance and financial services early was a strategy. I think also using Regal's investor network. Regal was a Y Combinator company and really going through the Y Combinator network early was a big part of it. Then, I think a lot of competitors really try to focus on the largest enterprise and I think Regal was smart to focus on the mid-market low enterprise where there was less competition.

How fast do you think Regal can grow over the next three years – less than 0%, 0%, 0-5%, 6-10%, 11-20% or greater than 20%?

Expert: I think greater than 20%.

What could be some of the most interesting ways to grow Regal organically if you were running the company?

Expert: I think there is a lot of opportunity to expand into e-commerce. I think that one of their core challenges has been that the verticals that Regal has focused on are just not known for innovation. Insurance, financial services, local services, these are all slow-moving industries, whereas I think e-commerce is known for moving a little bit faster. I think that's one thing. I think also there's a lot of potential to expand within Europe and there are some regulatory challenges because there is legislation being worked on in the EU around voice AI agents and how they can be used. I think if they can overcome that, there is a lot of potential in Europe for the technology to be effective.

Analyst: What one strategy would you implement in order to penetrate into the e-commerce industry?

Expert: I think there are very big retail e-commerce brands that operate as part of a holding company. Take Deckers Brands, for example. They're a big holding company that oversees HOKA, UGG and Teva. I would focus on these large holding companies and land and expand. Start with the holding company and break into one of the brands first. To use Deckers as an example, start with just UGG and then over time expand into HOKA and Teva and all of their other brands. I think the reason why Regal has not done this is that typically, only using one of the brands would be below the minimum seat count that Regal supports. It would be like a step back in terms of the initial deal. I think over time, you can grow the deal.

What would you do to improve Regal's margin?

Expert: I think there's a lot of opportunity to move talent offshore. Regal's entire product engineering organisation, or the bulk of the product engineering organisation, sits in New York City. I think it's just like an expensive company to run. The entire company is also based in New York, in person five days a week. I think that if the company were to consider remote work and potentially having people distributed across some lower-cost geographies like Colombia, you would still be able to have people in the same time zone but be able to have more talent at lower costs and potentially ship product faster at a greater velocity.

Based on publicly announced acquisitions, how would you describe Regal's M&A strategy?

Expert: Very little M&A strategy at this point.

Analyst: Have the previously done acquisitions been strategic or opportunistic?

Expert: Very opportunistic and very little proactive work there.

In your opinion, could it make sense for Regal to acquire, merge or be acquired by any players in or outside the space?

Expert: I think it would make sense for an acquisition from a big contact centre player.

Analyst: Could you share an example by name of such a big player?

Expert: Maybe someone like Genesys.

Analyst: What might be the rationale? How could someone like Genesys benefit from acquiring Regal?

Expert: A company like Genesys has a very cobbled-together solution that is really hard for smaller companies to use and so they don't really have a great offering for SMB and mid-market customers. It would give them sort of an offering for mid-market and SMB that they don't have today.

What would you say are the 1-2 biggest risks faced by Regal.ai specifically?

Expert: The risks would be if one of the larger players, like Five9 or Genesys, were able to build an AI native kind of very simple contact centre solution as a competitive offering. I think that's highly unlikely because I think if they were going to do it, they would have done it already. I think if someone were to build a competitive offering and have the capital and market reach that one of the bigger players does, I think that would be a risk. Then, I think, the other risk is just that the same things that benefit Regal from a churn perspective, which is that it's really hard to get people to replace contact centre solutions. If the macroeconomic situation continues to get worse and people are risk-averse from switching, it makes people adopting a new technology like Regal more challenging.

Analyst: Might there be any internal risks that Regal might be facing?

Expert: I don't think so. I mean, the company being based in New York is just a very high-cost way to run a company, but I think that they're doing the best they can.

In your opinion, is there anything that the market does not properly understand about Regal.ai?

Expert: I mean, this is a small one, but the company has rebranded to Regal.ai. I think a lot of people still call them Regal.ai. That's one small market thing that I think people have not fully caught on to yet.