Generative artificial intelligence chatbot startup Decagon AI Inc. is aiming up upend the nascent AI-powered customer support industry after closing on a $35 million early-stage funding round.

Announced today, the Series A round was led by Accel and saw participation from a16z and a host of prestigious names who joined as angel investors, including Box Inc. Chief Executive Aaron Levie, Airtable Inc. CEO Howie Liu, Okta Inc. co-founder Frederic Kerrest, Klaviyo Inc. co-founder Ed Hallen, plus notable venture capitalists such as Aaref Hilaly of BCV Ventures and Mike Vernal of Sequoia.

Decagon says it has created a powerful generative AI platform for building customer service agents that work much more like humans, going beyond delivering conversational responses. It says its chatbots can handle many complex related tasks that are essential for delivering solid customer support. In doing so, they can engage in more contextualized, conversational interactions with customers. At the same time, its platform gives customer support team leaders more visibility into their automated customer experience operations.

According to Decagon co-founder and CEO Jesse Zhang (pictured left, alongside co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Ashwin Sreenivas) the company powers chatbots that are uniquely able to service the entire customer support lifecycle, going beyond the conversational layer. They can reason through complex business logic in order to take actions on behalf of agents, analyze trends, write new knowledge base articles and more, he said. The chatbots also improve their performance over time, based on the feedback received from customers.

Zhang admitted that the customer support industry is one that’s rife with chatbots already, but he said many of those are capable of doing little more than offering “fancy demos” that ride the hype of generative AI. On the other hand, Decagon has built an AI agent that captures the business complexity of an enterprise to provide humanlike support.

“Just like a human support agent, our AI agents can do more than just answer customer queries,” he said. “By integrating with our customers’ existing workflows, we can take tangible action on behalf of the customer, such as processing a refund request or postponing an upcoming shipment.”

The startup says its chatbots have already made their impact felt at Eventbrite Inc., Ballarpur Industries Ltd. (Bilt), Webflow Inc., Rippling People Center Inc., Substack Inc. and several other Fortune 1000 enterprises, having launched its technology in beta less than a year ago.

Those companies also appreciate the increased visibility that Decagon brings to their CX operations. The startup’s platform features a comprehensive analytics dashboard that automatically reviews each conversation with a customer, categoring them in order to identify themes and trends. It will also recommend additions to the company’s knowledge base, based on the interactions it has with customers. It can then write these additions to the knowledge base, effectively teaching itself to better address customer’s inquiries.

Decagon says its enhanced customer service chatbots are the result of combining a mix of third-party large language models with several of its own, fine-tuned AI algorithms. In doing so, the company explains that it’s free to mix and match various models, or combinations of models, to handle each task related to customer service. It carries out regular tests on various common scenarios to ensure that its chatbots are both helpful, friendly and accurate, and free from any toxic or inaccurate responses.

Accel Partner Ivan Zhou said he believes Decagon’s team has fixed a critical paint point in the customer support business, having realized that most AI chatbots aren’t delivering the value they claim to provide. “We’ve been excited by the customers they’ve onboarded, and also impressed by how thrilled each customer has been with the Decagon experience,” Zhou said.

Going forward, Decagon intends to use the funds from today’s round to continue improving its chatbots and expand its business.

Image: Decagon