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Sydney-based customer-experience startup Lorikeet has raised $5 million in seed funding led by Square Peg and supported by Atlassian co-founder Scott Farquhar’s Skip Capital, highlighting the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) supplementing human resources for businesses.
Lorikeet has developed what it describes as a “groundbreaking AI customer support platform” that is powered by unique AI architecture that is able to resolve complex customer inquiries than is currently possible through existing support models or chatbots.
The company says it has experienced strong market momentum globally in securing new customers delivering “hundreds of thousands of dollars in annualised revenue” for the business.
The $5 million seed funding round will be used to support product development and fuel global expansion, particularly the US.
The capital raise by Lorikeet comes on the heels of $5 million in total seed funding announced this week by Brisbane-based Zeligate, which has developed an AI multi-tasking workforce platform for businesses.
Lorikeet was founded by Steve Hind and Dr Jamie Hall – former Stripe and Google AI executives respectively. Hall was one of the original research engineers on Google’s Bard project.
The duo developed Lorikeet’s AI platform to service a “broken” customer support system for businesses where they say customers “have to choose between clunky preconfigured chatbots or underpowered, hard to trust generative AI agents”.
Lorikeet says it has developed a system with AI agents that are powerful and trustworthy enough to handle complex, high stakes interactions.
The business has already attracted a suite of fintech and healthtech companies as customers in the US, Australia and Asia, including Remote.com, Step, Eucalyptus, Stashaway, and SensorFlow.
Australian venture capital firm Square Peg says its team met Hind as he “explored moving from San Francisco to Sydney about a year ago through another founder in our portfolio”.
“In our first few conversations, we were struck by his outlier intellect, incredible career as a top performer at Boston Consulting Group, Harvard Business School, Bridgewater, Stripe and Watershed, and his clear ambition to build a globally relevant, AI-native product,” says Square Peg.
“He believed in the Australian SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) story and believed he could build one of the next generational Australian businesses.”
Lorikeet says its AI framework is the first to be specifically designed to enable AI agents to solve complex tickets normally resolved by skilled humans.
Instead of solely relying on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) models, Lorikeet's AI agent has the ability to refer to and follow the same standard operating procedures that high-level support agents follow. The startup says this allows Lorikeet’s platform to actively solve a range of complex customer support problems.
"Our AI doesn't just retrieve information or make up processes on the fly,” says Hall.
“It reliably follows the right business logic while also keeping the conversation natural. If you can explain to a human agent how to resolve a ticket, our AI can handle it.
“It follows exact business logic and asks the right questions to solve customer concerns 24 hours a day.”
The seed capital will be used to drive Lorikeet’s growth in the US, which already accounts for about a third of its customers. The company has just started growing its team in the US.
Apart from Square Peg and Skip Capital, which is led by Farquhar's wife Kim Jackson, the seed round was supported by angel investors from the US, including Stripe’s ex-COO, Claire Johnson, the COO of Linear Cristina Cordova, the ex-head of support at Stripe Bob Van Winden and executives from Brex, Rippling, OpenAI and Retool.
Lorikeet sees its business growth meeting the “surging demand for intelligent, efficient and accurate customer support solutions across various industries and geographies”.
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