Toronto-based Ada Support, which has developed an AI-powered chatbot that delivers automated responses to customer support requests, has launched out of stealth and raised a $2.5 million initial funding round.
The funding was led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from Version One Ventures.
“The customer support industry will be one of the first to adopt AI to improve productivity, responsiveness and customer satisfaction.”
– Mike Murchison, CEO and co-founder of Ada
Ada Support’s chat allows customer support teams to provide automated responses to inbound customer support requests and questions. The goal is to allow customers to receive answers to their own questions more quickly than human-staffed customer support.
“Over the past year, we’ve kept the customer’s problem at the forefront of our platform’s development. Speaking with our customers, it’s clear that our platform has hit its stride in solving the problems we set out to solve,” said Mike Murchison, CEO and co-founder of Ada Support. “There are so many other organizations out there that are trying to solve this problem and we want to make Ada available to them.”
Ada Support also says its technology can also help human customer support teams focus more on technical issues, and build deeper relationships with customers. The company plans to use the funding to grow its business and enhance product development. Specifically, Murchison says that he wants to make machine learning more accessible, and increasing the personalization of its automated support experience.
“The customer support industry will be one of the first to adopt AI to improve productivity, responsiveness and customer satisfaction,” said Murchison. “Like previous technological breakthroughs before it, artificial intelligence will create new occupations that we didn’t foresee. It’s been exciting to see evidence that Ada Support is already beginning to facilitate this.”
Ada Support said that in less than a year, the company has gone from answering customer support tickets manually to automating answers to over 2 million customer questions a month. The Ada chatbot, which answers 40 customer questions per minute, currently serves companies including Shopify, Coinbase, Medium, and Telus.
“Ada is a tremendous tool for our team,” said Tucker Schreiber, a product manager at Shopify. “It has saved us from hours of support tickets, informed product decisions, and is a delight to use.”
While the company raised its funding from the Valley, Murchison is bullish about his belief that Toronto can be a global leader in Toronto despite stiff competition from other cities like Montreal. “When we were fundraising in Silicon Valley, it was really refreshing to hear from notable investors about their perspectives on how Toronto is becoming a global leader in artificial intelligence,” said Murchison. “We love Montreal as much as the rest, but there’s no denying that the volume of machine learning based companies, world class researchers, and external investment that’s flowing in and out of Toronto is helping define it as the machine learning capital.”
