Every week, CX Network publishes a round-up of funding news, product launches and exits from start-ups with solutions for CX, customer service and workplace challenges.
With details of the who, what, how, when and why, this new bulletin gives CX 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:
- Imprint's machine-readable loyalty proposition raises $130m
- Plurai raises $13m to bring the "Waymo approach" to AI agent failure detection
- triPica secures €12.4 million to advance telco industry's legacy CRM and billing systems
- Australia has a new unicorn as Future Secure AI raises $82m
- WhiteMatter's $20m Series A aims to fund closing the gap between AI autonomy and enterprise governance
- Palo Alto Networks explores acquisition of AI agent security capabilities
Imprint raises $130m to advance machine-readable loyalty rewards and new payment capabilities
The payments, loyalty and customer intelligence platform Imprint raised US$130 million in its latest funding round, led by existing investor Khosla Ventures, with participation from Hedosophia, Ribbit Capital, Spice and Thrive Capital, and new investor Positive Sum.
Since the beginning of the year, Imprint has launched programs with Albertsons Companies, Kroger and Shell. It's also involved in the Fanatics program, a partnership between Fanatics and American Express, which turns AMEX cards into sports memorabilia and allows AMEX to compete beyond cashback offers.
Imprint's proposition is becoming even more relevant as agentic commerce grows in popularity. Imprint brings payments, loyalty, and customer intelligence together so brands can learn from everyday spending and deliver recognition and rewards that give customers reasons to return.
It's also machine readable.
Imprint has released a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that allows AI agents to securely access members' rewards, virtual cards, and transaction history, along with tools for members to review and authorize agent-initiated purchases.
"AI will make every option easier to compare, which makes earning a customer's preference more valuable than ever," said Patrick O'Shaughnessy, CEO and partner at Positive Sum.
"Imprint gives brands a way to earn that preference every day through payments and rewards. [The founders] built the full-stack technology themselves, have proven their ability to win marquee partners, and are growing quickly. That combination gives us conviction that they can capture a much bigger opportunity from here," O'Shaughnessy continued.
Imprint now serves more than two million members and partners with brands representing more than $500 billion in annual U.S. consumer spending.
Plurai raises $13m to advance identification of AI agent failures
Plurai, the New York-based start-up founded in 2025, raised $13 million in its Seed round, led by Team8 and supported by U&I, Velocity and Mercer, and backing from more than 20 angel investors and industry leaders, including CyberArk founder Udi Mokady.
Microsoft 365 Copilot CTO Dr. Eyal Carmi has joined Plurai's advisory board.
The start-up has created simulation infrastructure for trustworthy, self-improving AI agents to solve a very real problem with the technology: AI agents are easier to create than ever, but making them reliable and cost-effective is not.
VentureBeat Pulse Research recently found that half of enterprises have deployed an AI agent or LLM feature that passed internal evaluations but still caused a customer-facing failure in production.
Plurai builds a digital twin of an agent and its world based on its client's knowledge base, tools and policies. It then runs thousands of realistic and adversarial users against the agent in a sandbox, covering the long tail of edge cases and exposing policy violations, hallucinations, incorrect actions, broken tool calls, failed tasks and sensitive data leaks.
The same simulation is then used to optimize the agent with Plurai fixing the failures it identifies and using the simulation data to create small language models (SLMs) tailored to each agent.
"AI systems fail when they hit challenges down the road which no one predicted," said co-founder Dr. Kadar. "Waymo built trust by testing and training across more than 20 billion simulated miles, roughly 100 times its real-world driving. Plurai brings that same approach to AI agents: continuously challenging them with the hardest situations and rarest events before they reach users, learning from failures, and improving before those failures happen in the real world."
triPica secures €12.4 million to move legacy CRM and billing systems into the AI age
triPica raised €12.4 million from TiLT Capital Partners, the energy transition investment platform of the Siparex Group. The funds will allow triPica to expand across Europe and double its team and use AI to automate some of the most time-consuming customer and billing processes.
triPica's cloud-native CRM and billing platform has helped telcos move away from legacy infrastructure to launch new products and services faster than ever before. It's now transferring that telecom billing and monetization expertise to the energy sector.
As energy suppliers move towards usage-based pricing, dynamic tariffs, bundled services and more frequent product launches, they are increasingly facing challenges telecom operators have already spent years solving.
"Every new energy offer, a dynamic tariff, a self-consumption contract, an EV charging plan, eventually becomes a billing problem," said Mathieu Horn, co-founder and CEO of triPica. "Suppliers have no shortage of ideas. What slows them down is a customer and billing system built for a market that no longer exists. We built triPica so that an operator can launch that offer in weeks. With TiLT, we will take it to more operators across Europe and use AI where they lose the most time today."
Horn co-founded triPica in Paris in 2016 with Walid Bounar and Christophe Ruzé. The start-up covers the full customer lifecycle, from product catalog and subscription to billing, payment and customer service, and lets operators launch new offers at speed.
Its clients include telecom operators in Europe, the Americas and Asia, including Bouygues Telecom, Digicel and CelcomDigi, as well as energy suppliers in France, Germany and Italy, including Primeo Energie and Gaz Européen.
Future Secure AI becomes Australia's newest unicorn
In its third funding round, Future Secure AI raised $82 millon (AU$115 million) in convertible notes from Square Peg, Yarra Capital Management, Macquarie Asset Management and Firetrail. The funding takes the start-up's value to $1.2 billion, giving it unicorn status.
The company is now headquartered in Austin, Texas, and has offices in Sydney, Melbourne, New York, Chicago, Toronto and São Paulo. Future Secure AI will use the investment for its continued global expansion.
The start-up builds AI "co-workers" for large organizations with a focus on regulated industries, such as investment banking, consulting, healthcare and law.
Future Secure AI expects annual recurring revenue to approach US$100 million by the end of 2026, according to the Australian Financial Review and is reported to be exploring a listing in the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) in 2027.
WhiteMatter raises $20m in Series A led by Blumberg Capital
WhiteMatter raised $20 million in its Series A funding round led by Blumberg Capital, with previous investors Crew Capital and Sprout & Oak supporting.
The start-up, formerly known as QuilrAI, will use the funding to secure and operationalize every agent, model and AI interaction across the enterprise from pre-production governance and validation to securing every action at runtime.
Because they work autonomously, AI agents are difficult to secure. But most of today's solutions still monitor from the outside in, detecting and escalating risky behavior after it happens rather than controlling it at the source before deployment.
Unlike existing point solutions, WhiteMatter is a platform through which enterprises can run their AI agents, securing the entire system. It works everywhere AI is used, built, and run: endpoint, browser, SaaS, cloud and code. It governs and deploys every agent, model, and MCP server in the environment; secures and observes each action before and after it executes; and optimizes agent traffic as well as spend through one controlled gateway.
"Despite all the discussion about pausing AI development, enterprises are doing the opposite," said Vidit Arora, founder and CEO. "AI technology is too powerful, the opportunity is too significant, and the competitive pressure is too real to put it back in the box. Companies that slow down AI adoption risk being overtaken by competitors that move fast, stay secure, and scale AI with confidence, which is exactly why we built WhiteMatter."
Palo Alto Networks moves to acquire AI agent security start-up
Palo Alto Networks is reportedly in talks to acquire Clutch Security, which secures AI agents' access to company systems.
The Clutch Security website states it provides "complete visibility, governance, and Zero Trust enforcement across your Non-Human Identities, AI Agents, and Secrets". The capabilities are powered by Identity Lineage Graph, which connects every entity to its origin, the people behind it, where it's stored and the resources it reaches. The start-up has won six awards year to date.
According to the reports, Palo Alto Networks would pay $500 million in cash plus milestone payouts. If it goes ahead, it will mark the seventh acquisition of 2026 for Palo Alto Networks this year.
Quick links
- Zendesk launches public directory to help AI agents find A2A service options for customers
- Every CX start-up funding deal you need to know: November 6
- Salesforce acquires voice agent leader Cresta