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Jesse Zhang, the CEO and co-founder of Decagon, emphasized the challenge of earning an enterprise company’s trust in the AI customer support chatbot space, noting that many focus on flashy demos rather than substance. Decagon, founded by Zhang and Ashwin Sreenivas, aims to change this by providing an AI-powered customer support platform that mimics human interactions. Despite being a recent entrant to the market, Decagon has already signed deals with renowned companies like Eventbrite, Bilt, Webflow, Rippling, Substack, and other Fortune 1000 businesses within a year.
Decagon aims to empower large enterprises and high-growth startups with AI customer support agents that engage users in realistic, conversational interactions while offering CX leaders enhanced control and insights. Zhang explains that their “human-like” AI agents manage the entire customer support lifecycle, handling complex business logic, taking actions, learning from feedback, tagging conversations, analyzing trends, creating new content, and more.
To achieve this, Decagon uses a mix of fine-tuned and third-party models. It integrates an organization’s knowledge bases and historical customer conversations, enabling its agents to generate personalized responses and perform tasks like processing refunds or rescheduling shipments. By learning from past customer interactions, Decagon’s AI develops custom responses, moving beyond simple decision trees and canned replies. CX teams provide feedback to the AI as if it were a new team member—one that is always available, responds instantly, and scales effortlessly.
Decagon offers its users control and visibility into agent performance by analyzing conversations, reviewing tags and flagged anomalies, and updating their knowledge base to improve customer service.
Investors are taking notice as well. Decagon announced $35 million in funding, with $5 million from a seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz and $30 million from a Series A round spearheaded by Accel. Other contributors include A, Elad Gil, Box CEO Aaron Levie, Rippling COO Matt MacInnis, Okta co-founder Frederic Kerrest, Lattice CEO Jack Altman, and Klaviyo Ed Hallen.
Accel’s partner Ivan Zhou praised Decagon for solving a critical pain point for enterprises, emphasizing that the startup’s AI goes beyond mere chat interactions to address multiple layers of customer operations. The new funding will help Decagon further develop its product and expand its go-to-market and engineering teams.
While Decagon has notable clients, the market for AI-driven customer support is highly competitive. Companies are moving beyond basic chatbots to more autonomous agents, such as Digital Twins. Competitors like Sprinklr and HubSpot offer similar capabilities, and Maven AGI, which recently launched with $28 million in funding, also operates in this space.
Despite the competition, Zhang believes Decagon leads the next generation of generative AI customer support agents. He acknowledges the competitive pressure but asserts that many current AI solutions fail to handle complex enterprise needs or take meaningful actions to solve customer issues. According to Zhang, Decagon stands out by offering a comprehensive, human-like experience across the entire customer service lifecycle, providing valuable insights and trends to CX leaders.