The funding comes from a number of individual angels, including David Zhao (Evie Labs, ZumoDrive), Ethan Davidoff (RiskIQ, Mixrank), Dave Liu (Bowers & Wilkins, Jefferies), and Agent.ai co-founder & CEO Fred Hsu (Manage.com, Oversee.net). The seed round will accelerate Agent.ai's platform development, and the expansion of its onboarding and sales teams, to meet growing customer demand in 2017.

Messaging is growing rapidly as a channel for customer service interactions due to its efficient and asynchronous nature. Unfortunately, most apps and websites provide a poor customer service experience and cannot easily or economically integrate messaging or bots into their existing infrastructure. Moreover, current bot-based messaging solutions often fail to provide human-like, customized responses and are built with a one-size-fits-all mindset.

Agent.ai solves such problems by offering a platform for app companies, that can be used either as a full-stack CRM, or as a layer on top of existing channels and systems, such as Salesforce, Zendesk, Facebook Messenger, or Slack. The platform uses event-based analytics to extract customer and session context, bringing the most relevant information to agents' fingertips during customer conversations, resulting in efficient ticket resolution. Then, Agent.ai's automation engine introduces AI gradually, learning from the most accurate source possible: a company's own agents.

Agent.ai's automation increases over three stages: the first stage consists of the AI engine monitoring agent interactions and company logs passively, as it learns to suggest and mimic the best agent responses. The second stage is called Copilot. Copilot suggests the appropriate response to customer questions; these are based on customer and agent interactions, support ticket resolutions, company knowledge bases, FAQs, and data from custom selected app events. Human agents can accept, edit, or reject a suggestion, which further aids the system in learning faster. As the system grows more confident in its responses, agents can turn on Autopilot mode. Autopilot handles routine questions so agents can focus on more complex inquiries. If a problem cannot be easily solved, the ticket will be automatically and seamlessly escalated to a human agent.

The company, publicly launched in October 2016, already has hundreds of customers and continues to add features to its full-stack, AI-enhanced customer support system. The company is led by industry veterans Fred Hsu (CEO), who previously founded Manage.com and Oversee.net, and Barry Coleman (CTO), who brings deep expertise in artificial intelligence and was a technology executive at MarketLive, Oracle, and ATG.