• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, May 29, 2024

Maven AGI has closed a Series A $20 million round of funding led by M13, with participation from Lux Capital, E14 Fund (MIT founder fund), as well as executives from OpenAI, Google, HubSpot, Stripe, and others.

The technology company uses artificial general intelligence (AGI) and its customer support agents will use the funds to further build out the engineering, go to market, and partner organizations. For now, its main goal is to build AGI systems capable of human-level comprehension and logic across diverse business functions.

By focusing on high cognitive-demand tasks, Maven's creators believe they can change workflows, beginning with customer support and expand into other critical areas.

This means that customers in the future will be able to tell their marketing platform to “give me 100 leads next month” and Maven will use multiple AI agents coordinated "by an orchestration layer” to deliver the desired outcomes without additional human involvement.

The funding brings the total investment capital raised to $28 million.

Along with the funding, the company shared insight into early customers, such as Tripadvisor, as well as data and future goals.

The average support ticket still costs $40. That cost is mostly for labor but also due to overlapping systems used to store knowledge, OpenAI wrote in a post, which explains that Maven’s technology works by training GPT-4 to the context of customer service in three stages.

Maven processes and ingests large volumes of diverse content regardless of format using data and customer interaction logs from platforms like Salesforce, Zendesk, Freshdesk, Slack, and SMS.

The tech company integrates the data into CRMs and enterprise APIs to understand the context of the user to personalize responses and take actions on behalf of the user. Then the technology critically analyzing its answers to ensure it’s providing the right answer and action.

Large enterprises typically spend billions annually on support. Maven AGI wants to reduce these costs by using AGI to rethink customer support. The goal, delivering personalized user experiences.

Rahul Todkar, head of data and AI at Tripadvisor, told Maven its technology autonomously handles 90% of incoming queries allowing its support agents to focus on initiatives that improve operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Tripadvisor's team support more than 30,000 hotels and restaurants in 43 countries. Support requests include profile changes from restaurant owners to updating payment information, campaign launches, and changes in property ownership.

In addition to Tripadvisor, MavenAGI works with other enterprise customers processing millions of support tickets.