Every week, CX Network publishes a round-up of funding news from CX and customer service start-ups.
With details of how much has been raised and who backed the round, it gives leaders and practitioners an overview of the latest capabilities in the vendor market, who the biggest new players are and how they can solve long-standing challenges with new solutions.
This week's bulletin covers:
- Verso raises $6m Seed to expand platform used by Ferrero, Orange and Michelin
- Salesforce snaps up two start-ups in two week
- Pluto Security raises $34 million to secure shadow AI use and vibe coding
- Harmonic Security closes a $50 million Series B
- Scuba emerges from stealth with $34m raised over two rounds
Verso raises $6m Seed to expand platform used by Ferrero, Orange and Michelin
Paris-based start-up Verso raised $6 million in its Seed round led by Angular Ventures, with participation from 100in, Kima Ventures, Olympe Capital and Sharpstone Capital. The firm is also backed by Hexa.
Verso automates consumer research across study design, participant recruitment, AI-moderated interviews analysis for large companies. It manages a qualitative study from design and participant recruitment through AI-moderated video interviews and analysis. Interview questions adapt as the conversation develops, while the resulting material is synthesized into a knowledge base that teams can scrutinize later.
But the insights don't live in a PDF.
Every study adds to a set of consumer personas, so teams can compare segments, see how opinions change over time and come back with new questions months later. The research becomes an asset that grows.
In its first year Verso has built a customer base of more than 30 household names that includes Ferrero, Orange and Michelin.
Co-founder and CEO Lydia Bellahouel said: "At BCG, I saw large groups miss out on hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue each year because they couldn't access usable consumer insights when making decisions.
"We're building the consumer knowledge layer that fixes that: accessible to business teams today and to the AI agents in their workflows tomorrow, so companies can act on what consumers actually think and be market leaders," Bellahouel continued.
The Seed funding will support additional consumer data sources, interfaces for AI agents, expansion into the US and hiring across engineering and go-to-market. Product expansion is also on the cards with Verso saying it plans to add quantitative data, social listening and other signals that usually live in separate tools.
Florent Quinti, partner at Hexa, said: "As AI makes it easier to build almost anything, understanding what people need becomes even more important. The challenge is knowing what to build and that starts with understanding what people think, feel and care about. Verso gives builders and AI access to that understanding. We believe it will become an invaluable foundation for building products people truly want."
Salesforce snaps up two start-ups in two weeks
Salesforce has continued its acquisition spree, snapping up two start-ups in two weeks.
It announced the definitive agreement to acquire Listen Labs on 29 September. The $2 billion deal rounded off a whirlwind two years for the AI-powered analytics platform, which closed its Seed and Series A rounds in April 2025 and raised $69 million in a Series B round on January 14, 2026.
According to reports, Listen Labs was in the advanced stages of running its Series C round in October, having signed a term sheet for $125 million and securing confirmation that Ventures would lead the round. It would have valued the company at $1.5 billion.
Listen Labs automates customer research with AI. Its AI agents autonomously design studies, intelligently recruit participants, conduct in-depth research and synthesize the findings in a single platform. Agents can draw from a global network of more than 50 million participants and run interviews around the clock in more than 120 languages, gathering perspectives from more people and markets in less time.
It says it raised a total of approximately $96 million in venture funding before entering into the acquisition agreement with Salesforce in September 2026.
Most recently, on October 12, Salesforce confirmed it had also acquired Loops – an Israeli AI-powered analytics and causal intelligence startup – for an estimated $30 million. It plans to integrate its team and technology into Tableau, which it acquired in 2019.
Loops built an AI agent named Scout that tracks KPIs, investigates anomalies and delivers root-cause explanations directly through Slack and email.
It previously raised a $14 million Seed round in 2022 led by Scale Venture Partners, with backing from angel investors, including Lenny Rachitsky.
Tom Laufer, CEO and co-founder of Loops, said: "We built Loops around a simple idea: analytics should help businesses understand what drives their results and decide what to do next.
"Salesforce and Tableau share our vision for making actionable analytics accessible for every organization. Together, we'll have the opportunity to bring what we've built to customers at an entirely new scale," Laufer added.
The heightened activity isn't out of the ordinary for Salesforce, but does mark its eighth and ninth acquisitions year-to-date. Salesforce closed 10 deals in 2025.
Pluto Security raises $34 million to secure employee AI use and vibe coding
AI security specialist Pluto Security has raised $34 million in its Series A led by Jump Capital, with participation from Skinos and Ansa Capital along with a cohort of unnamed angel investors.
As everyday employees – many without technical backgrounds – start to experiment with mainstream AI tools, existing security tools are no longer up to the job. By securing endpoints, Pluto Security gives organizations control again without simply saying 'no' to everything.
To do this, the software monitors the AI tools employees use, the skills, extensions, MCP servers and other components those tools rely on, as well as the apps and agents being created. It can then identify risky components, spot potentially dangerous agent activity and enforce security policies without stopping the employee in their tracks.
The software connects to endpoint security and device management systems working on these paths or directly on devices. It then analyzes prompts, commands, running processes, permissions and users' previous activity to assess what an agent is trying to do. If needed, it can intervene as the agent works, for example to block activities the agent hasn't been given permission to execute.
Pluto says that it currently secures "more than 1.5 million endpoints across enterprise customers worldwide, spanning diverse industries and including multiple Fortune 500 companies", reaching multi-million-dollar ARR within a year of launch.
The new round takes the total raised by Pluto by $42.5 million, following a Seed of $8.5 million led by TLV Partners, with the founder of cybersecurity firm Armis also investing.
Harmonic Security closes a $50 million Series B
On a similar theme, Harmonic Security which monitors employee use of AI tools and agents to prevent sensitive-data leaks and risky actions, raised $50 million in its Series B led by Crosspoint Capital Partners and with participation from existing investors.
Harmonic protects and enables AI use for millions of employees at more than 100 companies and recently signed new distribution partnerships with Climb and Distology.
"Every board I talk to is asking two questions: how do we reduce the risk of AI use, and are we getting value? Most vendors struggle to answer the first, yet we address both," said CEO and co-founder Alastair Paterson. "From the very start, we doubled-down on our custom small language models, which means we can benefit from a unique insight into enterprise AI use."
Harmonic's small language models read each interaction in context, in milliseconds; enough to tell a developer referencing a schema apart from someone pasting live credentials. The same engine powers Harmonic's Usage Intelligence layer, which shows leaders which AI use cases are creating value, which employees have found a faster way to work, and where to invest next instead of where to clamp down.
Harmonic's reach also grew through the ecosystems enterprises already run on. It is named among the ecosystem integrations for Cisco Cloud Control's new Agent Builder, announced at Cisco Live, connecting through Model Context Protocol. Separately, Harmonic built an integration with Claude's Compliance API, giving security teams visibility into Claude Platform activity logs, and into conversation content for organizations on Claude Enterprise, across Anthropic-hosted deployments.
The Harmonic team already comprises more than 90 people across the US and the UK and the start-up will use the new capital to expand engineering and go-to-market on both sides of the Atlantic.
This latest round takes the total raised by Harmonic Security to $76 million.
Scuba emerges from stealth with $34m raised over two rounds
Scuba, a collaboration tool its founders say prevents teams from losing great ideas, has emerged from stealth with $34 million in funding from two rounds. Its pre-Seed was led by Accel and its Seed round co-led by Accel and IVP. Other backers include Stewart Butterfield, Patrick Collison, Mike Krieger, Reid Hoffman and Drew Houston.
Founded by Slack's former CPO Noah Desai Weiss, and the former head of engineering at The Browser Company, Dolapo Falola, Scuba gives teams and AI agents a shared repository of company knowledge and context.
It means teams can save ideas from their browser, any app, their agents, or directly, including articles, screenshots, docs, videos, threads, texts, voice notes and write-ups. Scuba then automatically organizes it all, tracking the team's knowledge, decisions and directions without manual editing.
Scuba says it works behind the scenes "as a proactive thought partner that connects the dots across the team". Teams connect Scuba to Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and Slack, so every answer, artifact and line of code starts from everyone's best thinking.
"The frontier models aren't intelligence bound," says Weiss. "They're context constrained. "That's why we're building Scuba. So people never lose a great idea again. For companies that want to move smarter together. For teams with a mind of their own. We aim to be the one percent of AI spend that makes the other 99 percent pay off."
Weiss and Falola have been building solutions together since 2011 and Scuba marks their fourth venture.
Quick links
- Every CX start-up funding deal you need to know: October 9
- Every CX start-up funding deal you need to know: October 2
- Every CX start-up funding deal you need to know: September 25