ADA

Ada started in Toronto in 2016. Mike Murchison and David Hariri had done the grunt work of customer support themselves.

They noticed the same thing every support team knows. Most tickets are the same handful of questions over and over.

Where is my order. How do I reset my password.

Humans should not spend their day on that. So they built software to automate the repetitive stuff and free people for the hard cases.

They named the company after Ada Lovelace, the woman credited as the first computer programmer.

Companies pay Ada to run their customer service chatbot. Ada plugs into a business, learns its help content, and answers customer questions automatically.

When a customer asks something simple, the bot handles it in seconds, day or night. When it is complicated, the bot hands off to a human.

Ada charges clients based on usage and scale. The pitch to a company is simple.

Resolve most tickets without a human and your support costs drop while customers still get fast answers.

The core product is the Ada platform, an AI agent that resolves customer questions across chat, email, phone, and social. It connects to a company's own knowledge and systems so it can actually do things, like check an order or process a return, not just chat.

Ada rebuilt the platform around generative AI so the bot can understand messy, real questions instead of rigid scripts. The goal is a bot that resolves the majority of tickets on its own.

Ada grew by landing big logos early and letting the results sell the next deal. Meta, Shopify, Zoom, Verizon, and Mailchimp all became customers.

Support automation has an obvious payoff a finance team can measure. Fewer agents, faster answers, lower cost.

That made Ada easy to justify. When generative AI arrived, Ada leaned in hard and rebuilt around large language models so its bots could handle far more than scripted answers.

The 2021 raise gave it fuel to chase enterprise clients worldwide.

Ada is in a knife fight. Customer service AI is one of the most crowded spaces in tech.

Intercom, Zendesk, Salesforce, and a swarm of startups all sell smart support bots now. Generative AI made building a decent chatbot much easier, which cuts both ways.

Ada has better tech and bigger clients, but the moat is thinner than it looks. It also has to prove its bots are accurate.

A support bot that confidently gives wrong answers is worse than no bot at all.

Ada's $130 million Series C in 2021 was led by Spark Capital, with Tiger Global joining. That round valued it at $1.2 billion and made it a unicorn.

The earlier $44 million Series B in 2020 was led by Accel, with Bessemer Venture Partners and FirstMark also in. That is a lineup of serious growth investors.

Their bet was that automating customer service is a huge market and Ada was the one to win it.