The customer service industry is in a bit of a flux, thanks to artificial intelligence. Investors and corporate leaders have sounded the alarm for the BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) industry. On the other hand, AI customer support startups like Decagon, Parloa and Sierra have raised millions of dollars in venture capital funding.
14. ca Y Combinator-backed startup, is taking an approach to building a native AI company that has replaced legacy customer support teams at many of the startups it has 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 duo, Marie Schneegans and Michael Fester. The two met in Paris more than a decade ago and went on to build separate companies. Schneegans was a co-founder at enterprise intranet company Workwell. Fester previously founded Snips, a company working on local first-aiders for smart devices, which was acquired by Sonos in 2019.
After that, they wanted to start a company together, so they moved to the United States. They founded 14.ai to act as a native AI customer support company.
“We don’t build software for customers. 14.ai is a native AI customer service company. We combine software and services in one package. For customers, operating software is difficult, especially for customer service. We take over their entire operation and use our own stack built for customer service,” Fester said.
The company said it can integrate into a support system within a day and start clearing the backlog of support tickets very quickly. It can track tickets across multiple channels including email, calls, chats, TikTok, Facebook, Telegram and WhatsApp.
“We started working with a men’s health supplement company called Sperm Worms from a former YC founder who had a lot of backlogged tickets. His team of customer service agents were in the Philippines and they weren’t able to clear the tickets effectively. We took over on Thursday morning and by Thursday afternoon we had cleared tickets from all channels including social media, voicemails and emails.”
The company currently has six people working and they all take turns to be available around the clock for the clients they work with. The startup said that with the new funding, it aims to increase its headcount over the next six months.
14.ai only works with AI engineers and plans to hire more AI engineers. The startup is learning customer support workflows and other functions, such as sales and revenue generation, and is trying to automate tasks through its software so people have to spend less time on specific issues.
“We’re not just a support company, we’re a revenue engine because we capture all kinds of conversations early on for a customer and get insights from them,” Fester said.
The company wants to remove three key items from a startup’s balance sheet, including ticketing systems, artificial intelligence software add-ons and human labor costs. The startup is targeting multiple clients in different sectors such as luxury skin care brand Yon-KAsmart glasses maker Brilliant Labsand lighting company Creative Lighting.
The startup also wants to improve its own product by experimenting and letting artificial intelligence handle most of the work. That’s why it runs GloGloa brand of glucose gummies for type 1 diabetics, and is trying to operate autonomously with AI.
Tom Blomfield, partner at Y Combinator, believes 14.ai strikes the right balance between using AI and humans to serve customers. He said that with the right integration, AI can solve 60% of the work automatically and the remaining 40% could be handled by humans.
“As AI takes over more and more work, the balance between AI and humans will change over time. With existing platforms, the customer is left to constantly handle painful staff reductions,” he told TechCrunch via email.
“Instead, 14.ai becomes the customer service department, both AI and human. They can reassign customer support agents between customers at different stages of their AI adoption journey and do that load balancing much more efficiently,” he added.
It’s worth noting that AI-powered companies are one of the things Y Combinator mentions requests for startups in 2026.
