Solidroad Secures $25M Series A to Automate Quality Assurance for Customer Support with AI

Solidroad raises $25M Series A to automate customer support quality assurance with AI

In short: Solidroad, a Dublin and San Francisco startup founded by Intercom alumni, has raised $25 million in a Series A led by Hedosophia to automate customer support quality assurance using AI. The platform reviews 100% of customer interactions versus the industry standard of 1-3%, and counts Ryanair, Crypto.com, and Oura among its customers. Solidroad, a Dublin and San Francisco-based startup that uses AI to automate quality assurance for customer support teams, has raised $25 million in a Series A round led by Hedosophia, the UK investment firm. The round follows a $6.5 million seed led by First Round Capital with participation from Y Combinator, and brings the company's total funding to $31.5 million. The company was founded in 2023 by Mark Hughes and Patrick Finlay, both former Intercom employees, and currently has 20 staff across its two offices. Its customers include Ryanair, Crypto.com, and Oura, alongside large outsourced contact centre operators like PartnerHero and Tech Mahindra. Most customer support operations review between 1% and 3% of their interactions for quality. A team lead listens to a handful of calls, reads a few chat transcripts, and scores them against a rubric. The process is slow, inconsistent, and statistically meaningless: reviewing 2% of conversations tells you almost nothing about the other 98%. Solidroad automates this by applying AI-powered quality assurance to 100% of customer interactions, across voice, chat, and email. The platform scores every conversation against the company's quality criteria, identifies patterns in agent performance, flags coaching opportunities, and generates the kind of comprehensive view that manual review cannot provide at any practical scale. The pitch is not that AI should replace customer support agents, a proposition that companies like Wonderful AI (which raised $150 million at a $2 billion valuation in March) are pursuing more aggressively. Solidroad's position is that human agents are not going away, and the ones who remain need better training, better feedback, and better quality oversight than the current manual approach delivers. Hughes and Finlay's background at Intercom is not incidental. Intercom is one of the companies that defined the modern customer support software category, and its alumni network has produced a cluster of startups building tools for support teams. The founders' experience gives them both domain credibility and a network of potential customers who understand the pain points Solidroad is addressing. The seed round's angel investors reflect that network: Intercom co-founder Ciaran Lee, Wayflyer co-founder Jack Pierce, Voxpro co-founder Dan Kiely, CPL founder Anne Heraty, and former PayPal executive Louise Phelan. The Series A lead, Hedosophia, is best known for its SPAC partnerships with companies like Cazoo and Paysafe, but has been increasingly active in enterprise AI investments. Solidroad joined Y Combinator's Winter 2025 cohort, which gave the company the Silicon Valley distribution channel that Irish startups often struggle to access from Dublin. The combination of YC credentials, First Round Capital backing, and Intercom lineage has given a 20-person company access to enterprise customers that would normally be out of reach at this stage. Solidroad says Crypto.com improved its go-live customer satisfaction score by three percentage points after deploying the platform, with CSAT now above 90%. At PartnerHero and Tech Mahindra, two of the world's largest outsourced contact centres, onboarding times for new agents dropped by 50%. These are the kinds of metrics that contact centre operators, who run on tight margins and high turnover, respond to. The company holds SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certifications, which are table stakes for selling into enterprise contact centres but remain a meaningful barrier for early-stage startups. Getting certified at 20 employees suggests the founders prioritised enterprise readiness from the beginning, a decision that trades speed for credibility with the large BPO operators who represent the biggest potential contracts. AI customer support is one of the most active categories in enterprise software. AI chatbots now handle roughly 65% of customer service interactions, up from around 30% three years ago, and every major platform is building AI features into its support tools. But the QA layer, the part that ensures quality whether the agent is human or AI, has received less attention and less funding. That is beginning to change. As AI handles more frontline interactions, the need to monitor, evaluate, and improve those interactions scales proportionally. A chatbot that resolves 65% of tickets is only as good as the quality assurance system that catches the cases it handles poorly. Solidroad's bet is that automated QA becomes more valuable, not less, as AI takes over more of the customer-facing workload. The competitive landscape includes both point solutions and platform players. Established companies like NICE, Verint, and Genesys offer QA modules within broader contact centre suites. Newer entrants like MaestroQA and Klaus (acquired by Zendesk) have built dedicated QA products. Solidroad's differentiation is its focus on AI-native QA that covers 100% of interactions by default rather than sampling, combined with training and coaching tools that close the loop between quality measurement and agent improvement. Solidroad operates from both San Francisco and Dublin, with the company maintaining a five-day in-person presence at both locations. Dublin has a deep concentration of customer support operations, with major tech companies and BPOs running European support centres from the city. For a company selling into the contact centre industry, having engineering talent in Dublin and sales presence in San Francisco is a sensible split that plays to both ecosystems' strengths. At $25 million, the round is modest compared to the headline numbers dominating AI funding. Q1 2026 saw $300 billion in global venture investment, with AI accounting for roughly $242 billion of the total. But not every AI company needs to raise at a billion-dollar valuation to build a viable business. Contact centre QA is a defined market with clear buyers, measurable ROI, and the kind of recurring revenue dynamics that enterprise investors understand. Solidroad's task is to capture enough of that market before the platform vendors build comparable features into the tools their customers already use.

Solidroad lands $25M to bring AI to customer support interactions - SiliconANGLE

Solidroad lands $25M to bring AI to customer support interactions Solidroad Inc., a startup that develops software for use in training and coaching customer service agents, today said it has raised $25 million in an early-stage funding. The Series A round, led by U.K.-based Hedosophia Services Ltd., comes as enterprises are seeking ways to improve customer experience while managing rising support volumes and the growing use of AI agents in service environments. The company's platform automatically evaluates all customer interactions across human and AI agents to identify risks and skills gaps, and to offer personalized coaching in real time. Its approach centers on applying consistent evaluation standards across all customer interactions, said co-founder and Chief Executive Mark Hughes. "Traditional people-based quality assurance teams are inherently subjective with different reviewers interpreting standards differently," Hughes said. "Our system uses AI that sticks to a customized rubric, which means it's evaluating everything at the same standard with the same guidelines." Rather than applying a uniform model across customers, the platform allows each organization to define its own quality criteria, including tone, policy compliance and interaction standards. "We don't apply a generic rubric to every company," Hughes said. "Each customer determines their own quality standards. This includes criteria like what a good interaction looks like, what policies need to be followed and what tone fits their brand." That approach enables large-scale consistency, even at high volumes, he said. Hughes cited one customer that's running more than 800,000 conversations a month through Solidroad, with each one scored against a set of company-defined standards. "That level of uniformity isn't possible with manual reviews," he said. Solidroad says a key differentiator in its technology is the platform's ability to translate evaluation data directly into training interventions. "Most tools stop at the scorecard," Hughes said. "Where and how an agent might have missed the mark is useful information, but it puts the burden on the company to figure out what to do about it." Solidroad instead integrates evaluation and training into a single workflow to "close the loop automatically," Hughes said. "When Solidroad identifies a gap, whether it's a human agent struggling with a particular scenario or an AI agent drifting off-policy, we generate a realistic simulation tied to that specific issue." Targeted exercises are designed to replicate real-world scenarios, enabling agents to practice and improve before engaging with customers. "So instead of flagging 'this agent needs work on billing disputes' and leaving it there, the agent gets a targeted exercise that mirrors the exact type of conversation they struggled with," Hughes said. Early customers have seen improved customer satisfaction scores and reduced resolution times, Hughes said. Lead management vendor Podium Corp. "started resolving customer issues 33% faster after going through our training simulations, and new hires were reaching performance benchmarks in half the time." Customers have also seen up to a 90% reduction in manual review hours and a twenty-fold increase in coverage, Hughes said. He acknowledged that adopting automated quality assurance requires operational changes. "You need to define what 'good' looks like for your company: your quality criteria, your policies and your brand standards," he said. "Some teams also need to rethink how quality assurance managers spend their time, because the job shifts from reviewing individual conversations to analyzing trends and coaching at a higher level." Hughes said many organizations lack a unified approach today. "They're monitoring human agents with one process, and AI agents with another, and that creates gaps in visibility across the system," Hughes said. Solidroad's platform "creates a single, consistent view of quality across human and AI interactions, allowing teams to identify issues early and close gaps before they reach customers." Solidroad, which is based in Dublin, Ireland, with offices in San Francisco, plans to use the new funding to expand its product capabilities and its workforce as demand grows for tools that can scale customer support quality alongside automation.

Solidroad raises $25m as demand for QA product sparks fresh hiring

Hiring has already begun and will continue 'over the coming months', founder Mark Hughes tells SiliconRepublic.com. Y Combinator-backed Irish start-up Solidroad has announced a $25m Series A round led by UK investment firm Hedosophia. The San Francisco-headquartered start-up offers companies an AI-powered quality assurance and training platform that reviews customer interactions to locate improvement points. This data can also be repurposed to create training simulations. "Companies handle hundreds of thousands of customer conversations every day, but most can't tell how well those interactions are actually going. Metrics like response times or ticket volumes don't capture the actual quality of the experience," co-founder and CEO Mark Hughes told SiliconRepublic.com. As AI takes on routine requests, escalated conversations that reach humans get complex and emotionally charged, Hughes noted. This raises the bar needed for human agents, putting pressure on coaching. "We provide an independent quality layer across every customer interaction, so companies can evaluate performance consistently against their own standards." The new funding, as well as a $6.5m seed round in June last year, will help the start-up expand its teams across Dublin and San Francisco. "We're really focused on scaling...to meet a clear shift in the market," said Hughes. Solidroad currently employs 20. The next wave of hiring has begun and will continue "over the coming months". "As demand grows from enterprises looking for better visibility and control over both human and AI-led customer interactions, expanding our team is critical to meeting that need and continuing to raise the quality bar across the industry," the CEO said. In 2025, the then two-year-old start-up said it had around 50 customers, a number which has since grown a "ton", according to the CEO. Solidroad works with the likes of Crypto.com, Ryanair and Oura. "Across all of our customers, we typically see a 20pc increase in quality assurance coverage and 90pc reduction in manual review time," Hughes said. Hughes previously founded Gradguide, a coaching and mentorship network for college graduates, in 2019. The company raised $2m before being acquired in 2022. While co-founder Patrick Finlay previously co-founded Monaru, which helped product and marketing teams build in-app experiences. Solidroad, founded by the two in 2023, joined the Y Combinator accelerator as part of its winter 2025 cohort. Finlay's previous venture was a part of a previous edition of the accelerator. Hughes said his biggest lesson takeaway as a founder was "learning the difference between a product people find interesting and one they actually need. "I also quickly learned how to differentiate between what will actually make an impact versus what's just a trend," he said about his experience at Y Combinator. Don't miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic's digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.