The duo’s startup company, 14.ai, is replacing customer support teams at startups

The customer service industry is slowly changing, thanks to AI. Investors and industry leaders ringing alarm bells for BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) companies. On the other hand, AI-powered customer service startups such as Decagon, Parloa, and Sierra have received funding from venture capitalists.

14. noA Y-Combinator-backed startup, it’s taking an AI-based organization approach that has replaced the customer support teams that many startups have worked with.

The company has raised $3 million in seed funding led by Y Combinator with participation from General Catalyst, Base Case Capital, SV Angel, and the founders of Dropbox, Slack, Replit, and Vercel.

The startup was founded by a married couple, Marie Schneegans and Michael Fester. The two met in Paris more than ten years ago and formed separate companies. Schneegans was a co-founder Workwell intranet company. Fester previously founded Snips, a company that works on the first local assistants for smart devices, which was acquired by Sonos in 2019.

After that, they wanted to build a company together, so they moved to the US. The two took customer service as a challenge to solve, but they didn’t want to create a pure play SaaS company. They launched 14.ai to serve as AI-native customer support for the brand.

“We are not building software for customers. 14.ai is an organization that supports AI customers. We combine software and services in one package. For customers, application software is difficult, especially for customers. We take all their work, and we use our stack designed for the purpose of helping customers,” said Fester.

The company said it can integrate with the support system within a day and start clearing support ticket backlogs very quickly. It can manage tickets on various platforms, including email, mobile, chat, TikTok, Facebook, Telegram, and WhatsApp.

“We started working with a men’s health support company called Sperm Worms and the former founder of YC, who had a lot of tickets left. His customer service team was in the Philippines, and they couldn’t get the tickets removed properly. We took the tickets on Thursday morning, and by Thursday afternoon, we had removed the tickets from all channels such as social media, sms, emails, voice, chat.

The company currently has six people working, and they all rotate to be available around the clock for the clients they work with. The founders said that with the new money, they want to increase the number of people in the next six months.

14.ai is working with AI engineers and plans to hire more AI experts. The founders study the management of customer service and other tasks, such as sales and revenue growth, and try to create jobs using its software so that people spend less time on other things.

“We are not a service organization, but an engine of increased revenue because we capture all kinds of conversations quickly for the client and get information from them,” said Fester.

The company wants to remove three key features from the startup site, including ticketing systems, AI-enhanced software, and human capital. The startup caters to a wide range of customers in various sectors such as skin care A-KAmanufacturer of smart glasses Successful Labsand lighting company Creative Lighting.

The startup also wants to improve its products by testing and letting AI do more work. For that, it runs a GloGloa brand of glucose gummies for Type 1 diabetics, and they are trying to make themselves with AI.

Tom Blomfield, a partner at Y Combinator, thinks that 14.ai strikes the right balance between using AI and humans in customer service. He said that with the right combination, AI can solve 60% of the work, and the remaining 40% can be supported by humans.

“As AI takes on more and more work, the relationship between AI and humans will change over time. With existing platforms, the customer is left to work around the clock after the reduction of the headache,” TechCrunch said in an email.

“In contrast, 14.ai becomes a customer service department, both AI and people.” They can also distribute customer service agents between customers at different stages of the journey based on AI, with greater efficiency,” he added.

In particular, AI-powered organizations are one of the things Y-Combinator mentioned applications starting in 2026.