Ada Support, which has developed a AI-powered software platform to support customer service teams in large businesses, has raised $63.7 million CAD ($44 million USD) in a Series B funding round.
Ada Support aims to help customers receive assistance faster than human customer support.
The round was led by Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm Accel, with participation from existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, FirstMark, Version One, Leaders Fund, and Burst Capital. Ada said it will use the new funding to scale and add more functionality to its chatbot platform.
“Ada is an impressive testament to the tremendous AI innovation and leadership going on outside of Silicon Valley in Canada and beyond,” said Ben Fletcher, partner at Accel. “As we face a new era of economic uncertainty, Ada is uniquely positioned to help companies strengthen customer relationships and deliver impressive long-term value even as they may face limited resources.”
Ada was founded in 2016 and is based in Toronto. The startup’s co-founder and CEO, Mike Murchison, said the founding team spent over a year in customer support and found that existing solutions couldn’t scale in the face of soaring ticket volumes and customer expectations.
Ada ’s chatbot allows customer support teams to provide automated responses to inbound customer requests and questions. The goal is to allow customers to receive answers to their own questions more quickly than human-staffed customer support.
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The platform’s natural language engine is meant to allow the chatbot to understand meaning and context of a message without the need for perfectly constructed sentences, allowing it to navigate around jargon, typos, spelling errors, and more than 100 languages. Among Ada’s clients are AirAsia, Mailchimp, Shopify, Telus, Upwork, and Zoom.
“We designed Ada to help customer service teams take advantage of all the benefits of automation without sacrificing the personalized touches that are so essential to winning loyal, long-term customers,” Murchison said.
The startup raised a $2.5 million CAD seed round in 2017, which was followed by a $19 million CAD Series A. This latest round brings the startup’s total funding to date to more than $86 million CAD.
Image source Ada Support