Ada Support Emerges From Stealth with $2.5 Million from Bessemer Venture Partners
Ada Support launched its automated chat platform from stealth today and announced it has raised $2.5 million in initial funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from Version One Ventures.
In less than a year, the Toronto-based startup, led by Mike Murchison and David Hariri and initially began as Volley, has gone from manually answering customer support tickets to automating answers to more than 2 million customer questions a month for an impressive list of companies including Shopify, Coinbase, Telus and Medium.
Today, Ada answers 40 customer questions each minute and volume continues to grow at 30 percent, month over month. New customers can easily incorporate Ada Support into their customer service process and begin automating answers to questions in under an hour.
Ada Support’s chatbot platform makes powerful artificial intelligence accessible to non-technical support teams. Ada Support leverages proprietary AI technology to provide automated responses to inbound customer support requests, reducing the time spent on repetitive questions by 70 percent. This allows customers to receive answers to many of their questions much quicker than with human-staffed customer support, while also receiving support 24/7.
Among Ada Support’s first wave of customers are Shopify who have used the platform to manage 3,000+ unique conversations with 6,000+ questions answered and only 190 handoffs to human agent support. “Ada is a tremendous tool for our team; it has saved us from hours of support tickets, informed product decisions, and is a delight to use,” says Tucker Schreiber of Shopify.
Incorporating Ada into a company’s customer support strategy allows human customer service to focus on more technical issues and build deeper relationships with high-value customers. In addition, companies are creating positions and entire teams around the platform, appointing an “AI Manager” or “Bot Manager,” similar to positions like Salesforce managers.
“The customer support industry will be one of the first to adopt AI to improve productivity, responsiveness and customer satisfaction,” said Murchison, CEO and co-founder at Ada Support. “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.”
