Our Investment in Ada: Automating Customer Support with Personalized Experiences

We’re excited today to announce our investment in Ada, the company leading the transformation of ‘automation-first customer support.’ Ada is the leader in the Automated Customer Experience (ACX) space and has built a unique no-code platform focused on customer support. Their product allows non-technical users to build bots that automate millions of customer conversations around the world. The company was founded in Toronto, Canada by Mike Murchison and David Hariri.

We first met Mike over three years ago, and what has resonated with us most since then was Ada’s founding story. Scaling customer support was a challenge Mike and David faced firsthand at their previous company. They gathered feedback from peers and realized that they weren’t alone: no one had an efficient solution to solve rising ticket volumes. Add in live-agent chat with increasing amounts of customers wanting to interact with businesses over chat/text, and you have an insurmountable volume of inquiries and unhappy customers. Mike and David spent the better part of the year embedding themselves with customers as entry-level support agents, enabling them to gather the data needed to build the intelligence layer for customer support. The result was a no-code, drag-and-drop interface, taking advantage of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning and built to respond to inbound customer inquiries with a pleasant, experience-rich, conversational approach.

In the buzz and discussions about AI/ML in the enterprise, we are focused on companies offering solutions that are driving real business value, and Ada is doing exactly that. AirAsia, Coinbase, Square, Telus, and Zoom use Ada’s platform to automate over 50% of all their customer interactions, leading to well over 30 million conversations automated a year. Not only does Ada help to drive down customer support costs, but they help to improve live-agent retention and happiness by enabling support teams to own the bot development process, ultimately increasing end-customer satisfaction scores.  Ada is yet another example, along with Webflow and Process Street, of how no-code platforms are democratizing software development.

Investing outside of Silicon Valley is a central theme at Accel, and we couldn’t be more proud of Mike and David’s dedication to building the company in Toronto. As the most diverse city in the world, with some of the best talent, and some of the hardest technical challenges - we feel Toronto is a perfect place to build a category-defining company. Like UiPath in Bucharest, Qualtrics in Provo, and Atlassian in Sydney - we see a similar opportunity in Ada to help build the leader in Automated Customer Experience.

We’re honored to partner with Mike, David, and the entire Ada team as they enable highly personalized and engaging customer journeys through an automation-first strategy.

Read more about Ada’s next chapter here and Crunchbase’s coverage here.

- Ben Fletcher