SydneyAI startup Lorikeet has raised another US$9 million (A$14m), just four months after pocketing a $7.3 million Seed round.
This time Blackbird led the round, joined by existing investors Square Peg and Kim Jackson’s Skip Capital.
The raise values the business at $100 million.
Lorikeet was founded in mid-2023 (originally as Optech) by US-based former Stripe executive Steve Hind and former Google AI senior engineer Jamie Hall.
Several ex Stripers are strategic angel investors in the platform, which uses AI agents to deal with intricate, multi-conditional customer problems and other sensitive matters, such as confidential patient information and medical issue triage, as well as replacing compromised credit cards.
It’s billed as the first AI platform designed to enable AI agents to solve complex tickets normally resolved by humans, and can address queries in highly regulated sectors such as healthcare, finance, and cryptocurrency. Eucalyptus, Step, and MagicEden are among Lorikeet’s customer base and has a strong presence in the US.
The new funds will support aggressive expansion plans in the States and building the Sydney team
Hind, Lorikeet’s CEO, said they set out to implement artificial intelligence for customer service at a high level.
“We’re not satisfied with using AI to simply summarise FAQs, or implementing architectures passed on by OpenAI,” he said.
“Our intelligent graph architecture is purpose-built ground up to enable AI agents to reliably handle complex workflows in highly regulated industries that were previously impossible for AI to handle.”
Hall, the CTO, that effective customer support requires more than just conversational AI.
“Our intelligent graph technology is unique in its ability to both solve complex customer inquiries and know what it doesn’t know to avoid giving incorrect answers or engaging on highly sensitive or regulated topics,” he said.
Blackbird partner Tom Humphrey said: “Support is perhaps the highest impact and lowest hanging fruit opportunity for enterprise adoption of AI, and the market scale is absolutely enormous.”
Hind quipped that Stripe’s “Patrick Collison observed “that it’s remarkably hard to turn billions of dollars into good software” and Lorikeet is achieving that.
“We’re excited to be showing that a small, focused team from Australia is out-competing massive competitors by focusing on helping our users and solving hard problems,” he said.
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