Bird Seed: AI customer support platform Lorikeet flies high with $7.3 million raise

An Australian-US startup that’s developed an AI-based customer support agent used by the likes of Chemist2U and Eucalyptus to solve complex problems has raised US$5 million ($7.3m) in Seed funding.

Lorikeet, named after the colourful and garrulous Australian parrot, was founded in mid-2023 (originally as Optech) by US-based former Stripe executive Steve Hind and former Google AI senior engineer Jamie Hall.

The Seed raise was led by Square Peg wth support from Kim Jackson’s Skip Capital and strategic angel investors from the US, including Stripe’s ex-COO Claire Johnson, Linear COO Cristina Cordova, former Stripe head of support Bob Van Winden; Brex, Rippling, OpenAI, and Retool execs, and several other ex-Stripers.

Lorikeet is billed as the first AI platform designed to enable AI agents to solve complex tickets normally resolved by humans, while maintaining customer satisfaction as it handles everything from delayed orders to replacing compromised credit cards.

While the business is only going public with the raise, it already has several customers, including Remote.com, Step, StashAway and SensorFlow, and six-figure annualised revenue. The funding will underpin product development and global expansion.

Omar Alvi, managing director of the Eucalyptus brands Pilot and Juniper Australia said the platform has cut their customer response time dramatically.

“We’re delivering faster, more efficient support to our patients like never before, with no compromise to patient experience,” he said.

“Improving the first response time from 20 hours to 90 seconds has been transformational,” said

Hind, Lorikeet’s CEO, said they set out to solve the hardest support tickets, because that’s where they could create the most user value.

“Most AI agents focus on writing simple ‘Q&A’ style responses to customers’ questions. We think the hard part of support is executing the workflows that actually solve customers’ problems, so we focused on that,” he said.

“Our agent works just like your best human agent – and unlike any other AI agent. This approach allows us to work in highly regulated industries like financial services and healthcare, where accuracy and compliance are non-negotiable.”

The difference is that Lorikeet’s architecture goes deeper that the existing approach, known as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) models, with the AI agent able to refer to and follow the same standard operating procedures that top support agents follow cofounder Dr Jamie Hall, a former Google Brain research tech lead, explains.

“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,” he said.

“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.”

Stripe connections between Lorikeet and lead investor Square Peg are strong, as partner Piruze Sabuncu was Stripe’s first APAC employee and gets the retail space.

“Consumer facing companies spend 10-15% of their top line on support,” he said.

“And every year, CFOs and Heads of support orgs get pushed to reduce that budget. 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.”