AI Startups Decagon and Neuron7 Secure Millions in Funding to Revolutionize Customer Service and Repairs

AI startups Decagon and Neuron7 raise millions to transform customer service and repairs - SiliconANGLE

AI startups Decagon and Neuron7 raise millions to transform customer service and repairs Artificial intelligence-powered customer service startups Decagon AI Inc. and Neuron7 Inc. both announced big funding rounds today, with the former closing on a hefty $65 million investment, and the latter raising $44 million. Decagon said its Series B funding round was led by Bain Capital Ventures and saw participation from Elad Gil, A*, Accel, Bond Capital and ACME Capital, bringing its total amount raised to $100 million to date. Meanwhile, Neuron7's round was led by Smith Point Capital, the venture capital firm led by former Salesforce Inc. co-chief executive Keith Block, with participation from existing investors Nexus Venture Partners and Battery Ventures. The company has now raised $63 million in total. Customer service has emerged as one of the most popular use cases for generative AI, with intelligent chatbots becoming commonplace in a number of industries. However, there's a strong desire to make those chatbots even more humanlike than they are now, and that's exactly what Decagon is trying to do. The company, which raised $35 million in a Series A round just three months ago, says it offers a platform for building generative AI chatbots that work in the same way as humans do, going beyond just conversational responses. For instance, they can handle various tasks relating to customer support, such as creating tickets, processing complaints and so on. Decagon says this enables its chatbots to service the entire customer support lifecycle, going beyond just having conversations with customers. They utilize complex business logic to reason and take action on behalf of customer support agents, analyze trends, create and update knowledge base articles, and more besides. In addition, their performance improves over time, based on the feedback from customers who engage with them. The startup says its intelligent chatbots are the result of combining third-party large language models with its own, fine-tuned AI algorithms. It explained that it's able to mix and match various types of model, or even combinations of multiple models, to find the best mix for different customer service-related tasks. The company continually experiments and tests these combinations of models to ensure it can provide the most helpful, friendly and accurate customer service chatbots around, free from inaccurate or toxic outputs. According to Decagon, its AI models are transforming the role of human customer service agents. Instead of replacing those employees, most of its customers are transitioning them to higher-level roles, such as managing and overseeing the AI agents, instead of responding to customer tickets. Decagon co-founder and CEO Jesse Zhang (pictured left, alongside co-founder Ashwin Sreenivas) said many people believe AI is taking human's jobs, but he firmly believes that's not the case. "Our AI agents are enhancing jobs, not replacing them," he insisted. "In a few years, every company will have AI agents running their customer experiences. Customer support staff are no longer fielding routine tasks; they are now becoming AI managers -- configuring, training and overseeing the AI agents that handle repetitive work." The company cites the example of Ballarpur Industries Ltd., better known as Bilt, which is one of its biggest customers. "Working with Decagon was like hiring 65 agents overnight," said Thatcher Foster, vice president of customer services at Bilt. "We get 60,000 tickets per month. Seventy percent of those are being handled by Decagon's AI agents. Our monthly savings are hundreds of thousands of dollars. Our agent teams became much stronger, and the ones we retain are real product experts." Looking forward, Decagon said the money from today's round will help it to expand its engineering team and accelerate its go-to-market plans, while expanding into new industry verticals and additional modalities, such as voice. As for Neuron7, it provides quite a different solution to companies' customer service challenges. Rather than try to compete with Decagon or the legions of other AI chatbot startups out there, it's targeting the more complex domain of services and repairs. It serves a diverse range of customers too, including the automated teller machine repair company NCR Atleos Inc., the medical device manufacturer Medtronic Inc. and the printer hardware firm Lexmark International Inc. Neuron7 relies on a selection of open-source LLMs, such as Meta Platform's Llama 3 and Mistral AI's Mistral Large, feeding them with vast amounts of its customer's data, such as their knowledge bases, product repair manuals, technical documentation, support tickets and other records. Then, when its customer has a problem - such as a broken down ATM machine - they can call on the startup to help diagnose what that problem is. This helps save time, and the technician sent out to fix the machine will be able to ensure he or she has the correct parts needed to repair it. Once they arrive, Neuron7's agents will walk the technician through the step-by-step repair process, helping them fix it much more quickly than they would otherwise. According to the startup, this can solve some real headaches for its customers, which struggle with articles and manuals that are out of date, with the fixes buried deep within them, making them difficult to find. It also eliminates the time-consuming diagnoses process that's required to find out what's causing the problem. Neuron7 cites a survey by the Service Council, which says that 81% of technicians resort to phoning a colleague when they're stuck. The AI goes even further too, predicting any likely problems that might occur next, and suggesting preventative measures the technician can perform to prevent it from occurring. NCR Atleos' senior vice president of Global Field Services, Bill Girzone, said his company is charged with maintaining more than 600,000 ATMs across 60 countries. "Neuron7's solutions have been instrumental in transforming the quality of service we deliver to our global customers," he said. "With its AI-powered Service Resolution Intelligence deployed to more than 6,000 users worldwide, handling 1.4 million cases per year, we've been able to drive significant improvements in first-time resolve and resolution time." The startup reportedly did well to attract the attention of Block, who is an extremely well-connected person thanks to his prior role at Salesforce. According to TechCrunch, his VC firm Smith Point Capital has an extremely narrow focus, targeting Series B and Series C rounds only, working with just 10-12 companies at a time. That means it takes a lot of effort for startup founders just to be able to sit down in front of him and pitch their company's vision. But for Neuron7, it was worth it, for Block came away extremely impressed. "Neuron7 represents the next great leap forward for the service industry," Block said. "We were immediately drawn to its vision to establish a service-focused, AI-driven intelligence layer. Neuron7 delivers industry-leading, domain-specific results to an impressive roster of customers and establishes impressive strategic partnerships with major cloud platforms - milestones rarely seen in a company at this stage."

AI startups Decagon and Neuron7 raise millions to transform customer services and repairs - SiliconANGLE

AI startups Decagon and Neuron7 raise millions to transform customer services and repairs Artificial intelligence-powered customer service startups Decagon AI Inc. and Neuron7 Inc. both announced big funding rounds today, with the former closing on a hefty $65 million investment, and the latter raising $44 million. Decagon said it's Series B funding round was led by Bain Capital Ventures and saw participation from Elad Gil, A*, Accel, Bond Capital and ACME Capital, bringing its total amount raised to $100 million to date. Meanwhile, Neuron7's round was led by Smith Point Capital, the venture capital firm led by former Salesforce Inc. co-chief executive Keith Block, with participation from existing investors Nexus Venture Partners and Battery Ventures. It means the company has now raised $63 million in total. Customer services has emerged as one of the most popular use cases for generative AI, with intelligent chatbots becoming commonplace in a number of industries. However, there's a strong desire to make those chatbots even more humanlike than they are now, and that's exactly what Decagon is trying to do. The company, which raised $35 million in a Series A round just three months earlier, says it offers a platform for building generative AI chatbots that work in the same way as humans do, going beyond just conversational responses. For instance, they can handle various tasks relating to customer support, such as creating tickets, processing complaints and so on. Decagon says this enables its chatbots to service the entire customer support lifecycle, going beyond just having conversations with customers. They utilize complex business logic to reason and take action on behalf of customer support agents, analyze trends, create and update knowledge base articles, and more besides. In addition, their performance improves over time, based on the feedback from customers who engage with them. The startup says its intelligent chatbots are the result of combining third-party large language models with its own, fine-tuned AI algorithms. It explains that it's able to mix and match various types of model, or even combinations of multiple models, to find the best mix for different customer service-related tasks. The company continually experiments and tests these combinations of models to ensure it can provide the most helpful, friendly and accurate customer service chatbots around, free from inaccurate or toxic outputs. According to Decagon, its AI models are transforming the role of human customer service agents. Instead of replacing those employees, most of its customers are transitioning them to higher-level roles, such as managing and overseeing the AI agents, instead of responding to customer tickets. Decagon co-founder and CEO Jesse Zhang (pictured left, alongside co-founder Ashwin Sreenivas) said many people believe AI is taking human's jobs, but he firmly believes that's not the case. "Our AI agents are enhancing jobs, not replacing them," he insisted. "In a few years, every company will have AI agents running their customer experiences. Customer support staff are no longer fielding routine tasks; they are now becoming AI managers -- configuring, training and overseeing the AI agents that handle repetitive work." The company cites the example of Ballarpur Industries Ltd., better known as Bilt, which is one of its biggest customers. "Working with Decagon was like hiring 65 agents overnight," said Thatcher Foster, vice president of customer services at Bilt. "We get 60,000 tickets per month. Seventy percent of those are being handled by Decagon's AI agents. Our monthly savings are hundreds of thousands of dollars. Our agent teams became much stronger, and the ones we retain are real product experts." Looking forward, Decagon said the money from today's round will help it to expand its engineering team and accelerate its go-to-market plans, while expanding into new industry verticals and additional modalities, such as voice. As for Neuron7, it provides quite a different solution to companies' customer service challenges. Rather than try to compete with Decagon or the legions of other AI chatbot startups out there, it's targeting the more complex domain of services and repairs. It serves a diverse range of customers too, including the automated teller machine repair company NCR Atleos Inc., the medical device manufacturer Medtronic Inc. and the printer hardware firm Lexmark International Inc. Neuron7 relies on a selection of open-source LLMs, such as Meta Platform's Llama 3 and Mistral AI's Mistral Large, feeding them with vast amounts of its customer's data, such as their knowledge bases, product repair manuals, technical documentation, support tickets and other records. Then, when its customer has a problem - such as a broken down ATM machine - they can call on the startup to help diagnose what that problem is. This helps save time, and the technician sent out to fix the machine will be able to ensure he or she has the correct parts needed to repair it. Once they arrive, Neuron7's agents will walk the technician through the step-by-step repair process, helping them fix it much more quickly than they would otherwise. According to the startup, this can solve some real headaches for its customers, which struggle with articles and manuals that are out of date, with the fixes buried deep within them, making them difficult to find. It also eliminates the time-consuming diagnoses process that's required to find out what's causing the problem. Neuron7 cites a survey by the Service Council, which says that 81% of technicians resort to phoning a colleague when they're stuck. The AI goes even further too, predicting any likely problems that might occur next, and suggesting preventative measures the technician can perform to prevent it from occurring. NCR Atleos' senior vice president of Global Field Services, Bill Girzone, said his company is charged with maintaining more than 600,000 ATMs across 60 countries. "Neuron7's solutions have been instrumental in transforming the quality of service we deliver to our global customers," he said. "With its AI-powered Service Resolution Intelligence deployed to more than 6,000 users worldwide, handling 1.4 million cases per year, we've been able to drive significant improvements in first-time resolve and resolution time." The startup reportedly did well to attract the attention of Block, who is an extremely well-connected person thanks to his prior role at Salesforce. According to TechCrunch, his VC firm Smith Point Capital has an extremely narrow focus, targeting Series B and Series C rounds only, working with just 10-12 companies at a time. That means it takes a lot of effort for startup founders just to be able to sit down in front of him and pitch their company's vision. But for Neuron7, it was worth it, for Block came away extremely impressed. "Neuron7 represents the next great leap forward for the service industry," Block said. "We were immediately drawn to its vision to establish a service-focused, AI-driven intelligence layer. Neuron7 delivers industry-leading, domain-specific results to an impressive roster of customers and establishes impressive strategic partnerships with major cloud platforms - milestones rarely seen in a company at this stage."

How customer service AI startup Neuron7 convinced Keith Block to invest | TechCrunch

Five-year-old AI customer service startup Neuron7 just closed an oversubscribed $44 million series B round led by Keith Block and his year-and-half-old venture firm, Smith Point Capital. Neuron7 sits in one of the most promising areas for AI technology: customer service. But unlike the hoards of ChatGPT customer chatbot startups, or those doing natural language searches of manuals, Neuron7 is aimed at complex service and repair operations. Its customers, for instance, include ATM field repair company NCR Atleos, medical device maker Medtronic, and printer/imaging company Lexmark, the company says. "If you are one of the largest med device companies or high tech companies, and you give us millions of work order cases, you give us 15,000 manuals, in four days, we will give you a smart resolution hub that says the last 100 times you saw this particular error, these were the seven steps taken," describes Neuron7 CEO Niken Patel (in the photo on the left). Using open source language models like Llama and Mistral, Neuron7 consumes a company's product repair manuals, all of its support tickets and other support records. It then predicts the likely cause of a problem, helps the technician bring the correct repair parts and walks the tech through a step-by-step repair process. Still, customer service AI is an area where there is a lot of competition. There are knowledge database AI startups like Zingtree and Talla. There are call center software companies like Talkdesk that have added knowledge AI to their offerings. And then there's the giant incumbents, notably (and specifically) Salesforce, but also SAP, Microsoft, and ServiceNow, all of whom are targeting customer service with their AI products. Neuron7 has addressed the incumbents by partnering with all of the above-mentioned players. And ServiceNow's corporate VC arm is also an investor. While Patel wouldn't comment on Neuron7's valuation after raising this round, a spokesperson did tell TC that the valuation increased by 5x over its last round. It raised a $10 million series A in 2022. Neuron7 has now raised just over $63 million to date. Pitchbook estimated the last valuation to be $55 million post money, which, if accurate, would put its current valuation at around the $275 million mark. (The company declined to comment on the accuracy of Pitchbook's valuation.) Battery Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners co-lead the Series A and also participated in this round. With this raise, the startup landed Block not just as a lead investor but also a board member, Block told TechCrunch. This isn't just a feather in the cap for Patel and his co-founder Vinay Saini (pictured above, right). Block is best known for his time at Salesforce, rising to co-CEO with Marc Benioff, and his years running sales at Oracle before that. He departed Salesforce in early 2020 (as most of Benioff's second-in-command heir apparents seem to leave), and resurfaced in April 2023 as a founder of a new $400 million VC fund, along with co-founders Burke Norton and Chris Lytle. Unlike a typical emerging fund, Smith Point isn't doing early-stage deals, only early-growth rounds. It targets startups in enterprise applications, data, edge technologies, and, naturally, AI. Given that Block has connections with just about every large enterprise CIO on the planet from his previous roles, founders need a warm intro to get in front of him. (Smith Point's website is not much more than a landing page.) "We're very selective," Block told TechCrunch. "We work with 10 to 12 companies, and it's Series B and C growth equity." So when Neuron7 got ready to raise his next round, Patel asked his existing investors to introduce him to VCs that were most connected with potential customers. The list was short: 10 names. When Patel saw Block's name he got excited. He drafted a pitch deck, made the calls and the two met in person. Block was impressed by Neuron7's growth: currently 65 full time employees, 300% growth in ARR last year, which implies a small base revenue number but Patel points out that nearly all of the customers are from Fortune 1000 companies that have deployed the product globally. It counts 6,000-7,000 people as users. Patel said that customers are tending to double the amount they spend on Neuron7's products 16 to 18 months after they first start using them. In a world where so much enterprise AI revenue is going toward pilot programs, Block sees an "AI landscape" that's become "the wild wild west," he said. "Every board is asking their CEO, what's the AI strategy?" Neuron7 offers a "compelling" ansswer, and some "very refreshing" traction data, he said. "We think it's a massive opportunity," Block said. "Service is always ripe for reinvention."