Thanks to AI, the customer service industry is in a bit of flux. Investors and corporate executives are sounding the alarm on the BPO (business process outsourcing) industry. Meanwhile, AI-powered customer support startups like Decagon, Parloa, and Sierra have raised millions of dollars in funding from venture capitalists.
14.ai, a Y Combinator-backed startup, is taking the approach of building an AI-native agency to replace the traditional customer support teams of many of the startups it has worked with.
The company has raised $3 million in seed funding led by Y Combinator with participation from General Catalyst, Base Case Capital, SV Angel, and the founders of Dropbox, Slack, Replit, and Vercel.
The startup was founded by a married couple, Marie Schneegans and Michael Fester. The two met in Paris more than 10 years ago and have since founded separate companies. Mr. Schneegans was a co-founder of corporate intranet company Workwell. Fester previously founded Snips, a company working on local-first assistants for smart devices, which was acquired by Sonos in 2019.
After that, we moved to the United States because we wanted to start a company together. They cited customer service as an issue to address, but didn’t want to start a pure SaaS company. They founded 14.ai to act as an AI-native customer support agency.
“We don’t build software for our customers. 14.ai is an AI-native customer service agency. We bundle software and services into one package. For customers, operating software is difficult, especially when it comes to customer service. We take over their entire operations and use a stack built on our own for customer service,” Fester said.
The company says it can integrate with your support systems within a day and quickly start clearing your support ticket backlog. You can monitor tickets across various channels including email, calls, chats, TikTok, Facebook, Telegram, and WhatsApp.
“We started working with a men’s health supplement company called Sperm Worms, run by a former YC founder, who had a large backlog of tickets. His team of customer service agents were in the Philippines and couldn’t process tickets efficiently. We took over on Thursday morning, and by Thursday afternoon we were processing tickets from all channels including social media, SMS, email, chat, and voice,” Schneegans said.
The company currently employs six people, all of whom take turns serving customers around the clock. The company said it aims to increase its workforce within the next six months with the new funding.
14.ai only works with AI engineers and plans to hire more AI engineers. The startup aims to learn workflows for customer support and other functions such as sales and revenue growth, and automate tasks through software to reduce the time humans spend on specific problems.
“We’re not just a support agency, we’re also a driver of revenue growth because we’re able to capture all kinds of conversations with clients early on and gain insights from them,” Fester said.
The company wants to remove three major items from the startup’s balance sheet: ticketing systems, AI software add-ons, and labor costs. The startup caters to a number of customers across a variety of sectors, including luxury skincare brand Yon-KA, smart glasses maker Brilliant Labs, and lighting company Creative Lighting.
The startup also hopes to improve its product by experimenting and letting AI handle most tasks. To that end, the company operates GloGlo, a glucose gummy brand for people with type 1 diabetes, and is experimenting with autonomous operation through AI.
Y Combinator partner Tom Blomfield believes 14.ai strikes the right balance between using AI and humans in customer service. He said that with proper integration, AI can solve 60% of tasks automatically, while humans can handle the remaining 40%.
“The balance between AI and humans will shift over time as AI takes over more and more jobs. With existing platforms, customers will have to deal with one painful layoff after another,” he told TechCrunch via email.
“14.ai, by contrast, will be both an AI and human customer service department. Customer support agents can be reassigned between customers at different stages of AI adoption, allowing for more effective load balancing,” he added.
In particular, AI-powered agencies are one of the things Y Combinator mentioned in its wishes for startups in 2026.
