Strolid, a CX provider for the North American franchised automotive industry, has launched VCONIC Inc., a new venture that commercializes Strolid’s conversational data platform built on the virtual conversation (vCon) standard. Perry Evans, co-founder of Jabber and MapQuest, is CEO, and Jeremie Miller, creator of Jabber and XMPP, will serve as strategic advisor.
VCONIC was born from the platform that Vinnie Micciche, Strolid co-founder and CEO, and Thomas McCarthy-Howe, Strolid CTO, put into practice to improve the automotive customer experience. Strolid leaned into AI as a way to gain actionable insight from conversational data that could help agents and customers. Through three years of R&D, the company developed privacy-first vCons to listen to customers at scale, processing millions of human interactions across voice, chat and video, the company said.
The subsequent reliability and scalability of the platform helped establish Strolid as a vCon pioneer and resulted in McCarthy-Howe being one of the authors of the Internet Engineering Task Force’s (IETF) vCon Internet-Draft, putting vCon on the path toward industry-standard status and paving the way for potential large-scale adoption across multiple industries, officials said.
The proven test case at Strolid helped attract Evans and Miller to the VCONIC venture, the company said. VCONIC officials believe vCon is the “missing standardization layer that enables secure, compliant processing of voice, chat and video interactions at enterprise scale.” VCONIC will target platforms and organizations that “require transparent, privacy-preserving AI implementations, ensuring personal data protection remains paramount.”
Evans has extensive experience scaling communication infrastructure and SaaS platforms, while Miller has expertise in open standards and ecosystem development. “Their proven track record with XMPP’s universal adoption provides the blueprint for vCon’s commercial success across enterprise, government and personal use cases,” officials said.
McCarthy-Howe will also join VCONIC as CTO while maintaining an advisory role at Strolid.
