AI and product leaders from Google and Stripe have raised $5 million in seed funding from Square Peg to launch customer support platform, Lorikeet.
AI customer support agent, Lorikeet, has banked $5 million in seed funding from Australian early-stage venture capital firm, Square Peg, to launch a platform it claims can solve even the most complex customer inquiries.
Founded by ex-Google senior software engineer Jamie Hall and ex-Stripe product lead Steve Hind, Lorikeet (previously known as Optech), aims to make generative AI deployable at scale to improve customer experience beyond current support models or available chatbot approaches.
“Most AI agents focus on writing simple ‘Q&A’ style responses to customers’ questions,” Hind says. “We think the hard part of support is executing the workflows that actually solve customers’ problems, so we focused on that. This approach allows us to work in highly regulated industries like financial services and healthcare, where accuracy and compliance are non-negotiable.”
Lorikeet’s point of difference is its AI architecture, which it says lead to faster response and resolution times, improved customer satisfaction scores and cost savings for the client. (Lorikeet notes consumer-facing companies spend 10-15% of their top-line on support). The company says its AI agents are able to refer to and follow the same standard operating procedures that human support agents follow.
“Our AI doesn’t just retrieve information, or make up processes on the fly. It reliably follows the
right business logic while also keeping the conversation natural,” Hall says.
“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 company has so far raised more than US$4.7 (AU$6.8 million) in funding from Square Peg, leading angel investors and executives from Atlassian, Stripe, OpenAI, Rippling and More. Lorikeet says it has seen strong market momentum with hundreds of thousands of dollars in annualised revenue, and customers like Eucalyptus and Chemist2U.
Eucalyptus’ managing director, Pilot & Juniper, Omar Alvi, says the company has improved its first response time from 20 hours to 90 seconds. “We’re delivering faster, more efficient support to our patients like never before, with no compromise to patient experience,” Alvi says.
Lorikeet plans to use the additional funding to fuel its global expansion and support new product development.
“Lorikeet’s brought together a world class team to tackle these complex problems, using a unique approach to AI to improve the customer experience while improving the bottom line,” Piruze Sabuncu, Partner at Square Peg, says.
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