A married founder duo's company, 14.ai, is replacing customer support teams at startups | TechCrunch

The customer service industry is in a bit of flux, thanks to AI. Investors and corporate leaders have rung alarm bells for the BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) industry. On the other hand, AI-powered customer support startups such as Decagon, Parloa, and Sierra have picked up millions of dollars in funding from venture capitalists. 14.ai, a Y-Combinator-backed startup, is taking an approach of building an AI-native agency that has replaced legacy customer support teams at many 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 corporate intranet company Workwell. Fester previously founded Snips, a company that worked on local first assistants for smart devices, which was acquired by Sonos in 2019. After this, they wanted to build a company together, so they moved to the U.S. The duo picked up customer service as the problem to tackle, but didn’t want to build a pure play SaaS company. They founded 14.ai to operate as an AI-native customer support agency of sorts. “We’re not building software for customers. 14.ai is an AI-native customer service agency. We combine software and services in one package. For cust...