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:
- Ando raises $20m as it emerges from stealth to put agents inside team
- Agent identify verification platform Beltic raises $7.3m and invites collaborators to shape agentic commerce standards
- Champion raises $5m in Series A to help sales teams identify prospects
- Modulate raises $25m to scale voice-analysis software
- ElevenLabs valuation reaches $22bn following employee tender offer
Ando raises $20m as it emerges from stealth to put agents inside teams
A new messaging platform built for teams working alongside AI agents has raised US$20 million from Accel, Index Ventures and Emergence Capital.
Emerging from stealth after almost a year of building a team messaging platform, Ando puts AI agents inside human teams allowing them to follow what's happening across the conversations they're part of, maintain persistent context and memory, contribute proactively when useful and participate in Jams, Ando's live conversations, in real time.
Ando was designed from the ground up and elevates agents from their current silo of bots, integrations or private assistants operating at the edges of an organization. It is agent-agnostic, meaning teams can bring the cloud agents and harnesses they already use, including Codex, Claude, Grokbot and others.
CEO Sara Du said: "This isn't about whether Slack or Teams can add agents. Of course they can. Starting from scratch, unencumbered by legacy scaffolding, lets us design around what agents are actually capable of rather than what existing software allows them to be. I think agents are capable of surprising us if we actually give them the permissions and the context"
Prior to Ando, Du founded enterprise API platform Alloy Automation. She is a Thiel Fellow and started Ando after seeing how limited today's critical work platforms were for agents operating alongside humans.
Ivan Zhou, a partner at Accel, said: "Agents aren't simply another feature inside existing workplace software. They're becoming participants in companies themselves. Sara saw early that this shift would require an entirely new kind of workspace built around collaboration between people and agents. We believe that creates a new category of coordination software, and that Ando has the opportunity to define it."
Beltic raises $7.3m and invites collaborators to shape agentic commerce standards
While Ando is helping agents become part of hybrid teams, Beltic has raised $7.3 million in its Seed round, allowing businesses to decide what AI agents can do on their websites and systems.
The round, which takes Beltic out of stealth, was led by Norwest with Restive Ventures, Oxford Seed Fund and previous investor Collide Capital participating. It takes the company's total funding to date to $8.8 million. It doesn't sound huge compared to other start-ups CX Network has reported on, however it sits in the top four percent of all time Seed rounds in the legal sector.
The reason is clear: Beltic is spearheading verification for secure agent-to-agent transactions, AKA machine customers. Its founders say legacy systems built for human traffic "will break under agent traffic" and that, at scale, "every transaction requires a new layer of verification: identifying the agent, verifying the entity behind it and determining whether each action is authorized – all in real time".
Isha Bhatnagar, Beltic CEO and co-founder – and Coinbase's former head of product for global regulatory experience – said in a press release: "For decades, a large part of risk management was asking and verifying, 'are you human?' Agents can already gather information on people's behalf. The next opportunity is letting them act autonomously, but the safeguards built to protect humans and businesses have become the barrier. Beltic verifies both the agent and the transaction, so companies can safely accept agent traffic and send agents into the world."
This funding news broke only days after a consortium of six global banks jointly published a shared set of principles they say will support the development of "trusted agentic commerce".
Beltic is now partnering with a select group of companies at the forefront of agentic commerce and payments. Design partners will get early access to Beltic's infrastructure and help shape the standards for how agents transact.
Interested companies can reach the team at join@beltic.com
Champion raises $5m in Series A to help sales teams identify prospects
Champion raised $5 million in its Series A led by Armory Square Ventures and supported by Bread and Butter Ventures and others. It takes Champion's total raise to $10.3 million since its 2023 launch and puts it on track to break even within 12 months.
Ironically, Champion's solution uses AI to make humans "more human". Specifically, it helps sales teams generate higher-quality leads by leveraging AI to identify their most enthusiastic customers, then coaching humans to be better at closing the sale. Siemens, ServiceTitan and Canva have all been named as early users.
"Most of the pitches right now are how AI can replace humans and that is the exact opposite of what we want to build. We want to empower humans," said Jeff Reekers, co-founder and CEO and the former CMO of Aircall. "We want our clients to spend more time building relationships and understanding their customers."
Reekers' co-founders are his former colleague Gianna Scorsone, who led Aircall's North America division and is COO of Champion, and Courtney Crispin, who was a software engineering executive at Salesforce.
The new funds will support further product development and its ongoing hiring spree, as it works to grow headcount to 20 employees by early 2027.
Modulate raises $25m to scale voice-analysis software
Modulate raised $25 million from Hyperplane and Lakestar after experiencing growing adoption of its audio AI models across fraud prevention, voice AI agent supervision, customer experience, trust and safety and other emerging voice applications.
The new funds will allow Modulate to expand the team and infrastructure needed to meet growing demand from developers and partners building voice applications. The capital will also support increased investment across AI/ML research, product and engineering and developer relations and partnerships, while continuing to broaden the APIs, models and deployment options available to developers.
The full range of use cases includes: protecting healthcare institutions from deepfake hackers; enhancing the emotion and empathy capabilities of voice AI agents; reducing extremism and harassment on social platforms; observing and monitoring voice agent performance; detecting and stopping child grooming voice conversations; and protecting agents in high-risk scenarios from being identified through advanced voice masking.
"Voice is becoming a primary interface for AI, and that creates a whole new set of problems that can't be solved from a transcript," said Carter Huffman, CEO and co-founder.
"We're already using audio-native AI to protect organizations from deepfake attacks, help voice agents understand emotion and respond with more empathy, identify dangerous behavior in online conversations and monitor whether voice agents are actually performing the way they're supposed to. Underneath all of that are more than a hundred specialized models working together to understand what's really happening across audio, with dramatically less cost and compute than traditional large models."
ElevenLabs valuation reaches $22bn following employee tender offer
More news from ElevenLabs this week, on September 30 the start-up confirmed it had closed a $300 million employee tender offer that values it at $22 billion, double the valuation at its February Series D round.
As part of the tender, EQT, Goldman Sachs, GIC, OTPP, Sapphire Ventures and BDT & MSD invested in ElevenLabs for the first time, alongside existing investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, ICONIQ, D.E. Shaw, Evantic, DISRUPTIVE and Alkeon.
"AI should interact with people the way we interact with each other," said co-founder and CEO, Mati Staniszewski. "Getting this right will help ensure AI diffuses widely across the economy, and everyone is able to shape and benefit from it, regardless of technical skill. We're already seeing rapid adoption of expressive voice agents by enterprises and governments, who are deploying them in service of consumers and citizens. As we grow, it's important to us to let our people share in some of the value they are creating for our customers and the wider world."
An employee tender offer gives employees with stock a sell option ahead of an initial public offering (IPO) or acquisition.
Quick links
- Every CX start-up funding deal you need to know: September 25
- Every CX start-up funding deal you need to know: September 18
- Every CX start-up funding deal you need to know: September 11