Decagon launches with $35m raised from Accel and a16z

Announcing our $35M Series A from Accel and a16z to Bring Human-Like AI Customer Support to the Enterprise

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SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA -- June 18, 2024 -- Decagon, a generative AI company powering enterprise customer support, emerged from stealth today and announced its $5M Seed and $30M Series A funding rounds. The Seed round was led by a16z and the Series A was led by Accel with participation from A*, Elad Gil, and notable angels including Aaron Levie (CEO, Box), Howie Liu (CEO, Airtable), Matt MacInnis (COO, Rippling), Aaref Hilaly (Partner, BCV), Mike Vernal (Ex-Sequoia), Frederic Kerrest (Cofounder, Okta), Jack Altman (CEO, Lattice), and Ed Hallen (Cofounder, Klaviyo). Ivan Zhou also joins the Decagon board from Accel. Founded by CEO Jesse Zhang and CTO Ashwin Sreenivas, Decagon provides businesses such as Eventbrite, Bilt, Webflow, Substack, and Rippling with a powerful generative AI platform that mirrors human capabilities, by accurately and autonomously handling complex customer support jobs.

When starting Decagon, Jesse and Ashwin noticed that enterprise customers felt deep pain with their customer support. While enterprises had previously implemented chatbots, these previous generation solutions eroded customer trust. Incumbent chatbots were a maze of decision trees and canned responses that ultimately did not solve customer issues. Decagon's human-like AI agents, however, were able to solve the vast majority of customer contacts, with only minimal oversight and setup.

“Customer support chatbots may seem like a crowded space, but we see more ‘fancy demos’ riding the AI hype than products that can truly win the trust of an enterprise company. Decagon has built an AI agent that gives customers a human-like customer support experience by capturing the business complexity of a large enterprise.” said Jesse Zhang, co-founder and CEO of Decagon. "Just like a human support agent, our AI agents can do more than just answer customer queries. 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."

Additionally, Decagon gives customer support leaders the tools to have greater control and visibility into their organizations. Decagon’s AI-powered analytics dashboard automatically reviews and categorizes customer conversations to identify themes and suggests additions to their knowledge base to better address customer inquiries. Customer experience leaders can use Decagon to become proactive in their approach to customer support, rather than reacting to individual customer requests.

"Working with the Decagon team has been sensational," said Thatcher Foster, VP of Client Solutions at Bilt. "They have taken our complicated data and workflows, and built a robust, intelligent, and highly highly effective support tool for our members. Decagon has significantly strengthened our operational work streams, and we look forward to continuing our partnership for years to come.”

Decagon’s platform is built on a mix of large language models, including both third-party and fine-tuned models. This proprietary AI stack enables Decagon’s product advantage, as they regularly test and select the optimal model for each task, such as categorizing an incoming request, checking a message for accuracy, or writing a final response to the customer.

"Jesse, Ashwin, and the Decagon team have solved a critical pain point for enterprises: building an AI product that goes beyond the customer-facing chat experience and addresses each layer of the customer operations stack from proactively updating an enterprise’s knowledge base to automatically routing insights through customer support to engineering and product teams,” said Ivan Zhou, Partner at Accel. “We are impressed by the customers they’ve onboarded and how they already do more with AI without a big engineering lift for their customers. We couldn't be more excited for the continued partnership."

Lastly, the security and robustness of generative AI models is top of mind for all organizations. Decagon is committed to always holding the highest standards for security guardrails and rigorous testing and we're proud to be a leader in pushing forward production-grade AI systems. "Most existing chatbots are quite bad and fail to understand customers adequately. However, I believe that Decagon's product stands out with its exceptional human-like interactions and deep understanding of the underlying business context. Decagon's innovation excites me and aligns with my vision for next-generation chatbots that are central to building human-like interactions while also managing security risks effectively." said Mukund Sarma, Sr. Director Product Security, Fastest Growing US Fintech Co.

The capital raised will enable Decagon to continue advancing its product and expanding its team.

If you’re interested in partnering with Decagon, please reach out.

If you’re interested in joining the team, take a look at our careers page!