Solidroad, a man-made intelligence startup that guarantees to resolve one among customer support’s most persistent issues, has raised $6.5 million in seed funding to increase its platform that robotically trains customer support representatives and improves AI brokers.
The Dublin-founded firm, led by First Spherical Capital with participation from Y Combinator, addresses a elementary problem going through rising companies: the best way to preserve high-quality buyer experiences whereas controlling prices as dialog volumes explode previous 10,000 interactions monthly.
“CX leaders scaling past 10,000 conversations a month are often stuck between two options: either they maintain quality and eat the cost, or cut costs and watch customer satisfaction suffer,” mentioned Mark Hughes, co-founder and CEO of Solidroad, in an unique interview with VentureBeat. “None of the traditional solutions work.”
The funding spherical, which brings Solidroad’s complete capital raised to $8 million, comes as firms more and more battle to stability buyer expertise high quality with operational effectivity. Conventional approaches — offshore outsourcing, legacy high quality assurance instruments, or totally automated AI brokers — usually lead to deteriorating buyer satisfaction scores, in accordance with Hughes.
How AI analyzes each buyer dialog to create personalised coaching simulations
Solidroad’s platform operates as what Hughes calls “an aggregation layer” that sits atop current buyer communication channels, analyzing each interplay between firms and their clients. In contrast to AI options that try to switch human brokers completely, Solidroad focuses on making each human representatives and AI programs simpler.
The platform robotically evaluations 100% of buyer conversations throughout a number of channels, making use of AI-powered high quality assurance that historically required handbook assessment of simply 1-3% of interactions. Extra critically, it transforms these insights into actionable enhancements by way of individualized coaching simulations for human brokers and refinement suggestions for AI programs.
The system generates personalised coaching situations primarily based on precise dialog patterns and recognized talent gaps, creating what Hughes describes as focused teaching at scale with out including course of overhead or extra workers.
Early buyer outcomes counsel the strategy delivers measurable enhancements. Crypto.com, the cryptocurrency trade, used Solidroad to cut back common dealing with time by 18% whereas concurrently enhancing buyer satisfaction scores from 87% to 90% — a 3-percentage-point enhance that represents vital enchancment within the customer support trade.
Advertising and marketing automation platform ActiveCampaign reported saving the equal of a full 12 months of handbook teaching time, which the corporate reinvested into higher-leverage coaching initiatives and quicker suggestions mechanisms. Buyer engagement platform Podium reduce new rent ramp time in half by embedding Solidroad’s AI simulations into their onboarding course of.
“Across the board, Solidroad customers are seeing 90% or higher go-live CSAT scores, faster ramp times, and a huge reduction in manual QA work,” Hughes mentioned, citing extra outcomes from PartnerHero, which noticed a 30% enchancment in agent proficiency scores.
The platform presently analyzes a whole lot of hundreds of conversations month-to-month for greater than 50 clients, with new firms signing up weekly, in accordance with the corporate.
Hughes and co-founder Patrick Finlay, who serves as chief know-how officer, developed their understanding of buyer expertise challenges throughout their tenure at Intercom, the client messaging platform the place they first met and collaborated.
“Patrick was building features; I was selling them,” Hughes recalled. “We saw firsthand how important customer experience is to growth, but also how frustrating it was to work with tools that didn’t actually help CX teams do their jobs better. Even great companies were stuck duct-taping together solutions that weren’t built for them.”
The duo represents a rising development of second-time founders making use of synthetic intelligence to enterprise operational challenges. Hughes beforehand based and offered Gradguide, a profession steerage platform, whereas Finlay co-founded Y Combinator-backed no-code startup Monaru.
Why Solidroad selected human augmentation over the AI alternative development sweeping customer support
The shopper expertise software program market has exploded as firms acknowledge the income influence of buyer satisfaction, however many current options give attention to both full automation or primary analytics reasonably than systematic enchancment of human efficiency.
Conventional high quality assurance instruments sometimes require vital handbook oversight and supply retrospective insights reasonably than proactive coaching. In the meantime, totally automated AI brokers, whereas promising price financial savings, usually battle with complicated or emotionally nuanced buyer interactions, typically delivering what Hughes characterizes as “hallucinations” reasonably than useful responses.
“Unlike other AI-powered CX solutions, we don’t handle conversations ourselves,” Hughes defined. “Most AI CX tools are trying to replace humans with AI agents. We help them improve.”
This positioning displays a broader trade debate concerning the optimum stability between human brokers and synthetic intelligence in customer support operations.
First Spherical Capital’s wager alerts confidence in human-AI collaboration over full automation
First Spherical Capital’s lead funding represents a big validation of Solidroad’s strategy. The enterprise agency beforehand led early rounds for firms together with Notion, Uber, and different category-defining platforms, suggesting confidence in Solidroad’s potential to reshape buyer expertise know-how.
“We’re excited to be working with First Round which was the first institutional investor in companies like Notion, Uber, and many more,” Hughes famous within the firm’s announcement. “But more importantly, they’ve backed founders who know how to build.”
The funding will primarily assist aggressive hiring, significantly in San Francisco the place the corporate is establishing its main hub. Solidroad plans to relocate its Eire-based crew to the Bay Space whereas increasing throughout engineering and go-to-market features.
“We’re currently focused on hiring engineering and go-to-market roles,” Hughes mentioned. “We’re looking for people who want to be at the frontier of AI and customer experience.”
Enterprise safety measures handle rising issues about AI analyzing delicate conversations
As Solidroad analyzes delicate buyer conversations, the corporate has carried out enterprise-grade safety measures together with SOC 2 Kind 2 and ISO27001 compliance. Buyer knowledge stays remoted in safe workspaces with no cross-client sharing, addressing privateness issues which have change into more and more essential as firms undertake AI-powered instruments.
“Security and privacy are core to how we operate,” Hughes emphasised. “Each customer’s data lives in a secure, isolated workspace. Nothing is ever shared between clients.”
What Solidroad’s success reveals about the way forward for office AI adoption
Solidroad’s strategy displays broader traits in synthetic intelligence adoption, the place firms more and more search augmentation reasonably than alternative of human capabilities. Moderately than pursuing full automation, the platform permits what Hughes describes as “the right balance of humans and AI.”
“We believe AI should handle repetitive, transactional work, and humans should take care of complex, emotional, and nuanced interactions,” Hughes mentioned. “Solidroad helps companies understand where that line is and then helps both sides of it improve.”
This philosophy aligns with rising enterprise AI methods that emphasize human-AI collaboration reasonably than wholesale alternative of employees.
The larger image: Why steady enchancment might matter greater than good automation
Solidroad’s speedy progress and substantial funding spherical illuminate a essential shift in how enterprises strategy synthetic intelligence — one which prioritizes systematic enchancment over revolutionary alternative. Whereas a lot of the AI discourse focuses on dramatic automation that eliminates human roles completely, Solidroad’s success means that firms might discover better worth in applied sciences that make their current workforce measurably higher.
The timing is especially vital. Because the preliminary pleasure round totally autonomous AI brokers encounters the messy realities of customer support—the place empathy, context, and nuanced problem-solving stay distinctly human strengths — firms are discovering that essentially the most priceless AI functions could also be people who improve reasonably than eradicate human capabilities.
Hughes’s imaginative and prescient of constructing “every customer interaction” a studying alternative represents one thing extra profound than course of optimization. It suggests a future the place synthetic intelligence serves as a steady suggestions loop, continually elevating the baseline of human efficiency reasonably than changing it. This strategy might show extra sustainable and in the end extra transformative than the binary alternative between human or AI that has dominated a lot enterprise know-how discourse.
In an period the place buyer expertise more and more determines enterprise success, the businesses that determine the best way to systematically enhance reasonably than merely automate might uncover they’ve constructed one thing way more priceless than a cost-cutting device — they’ve created a aggressive benefit that compounds over time.
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