Every week, CX Network publishes a round-up of funding news from start-ups with solutions for CX, customer service and workplace challenges.
With details of how much has been raised and who backed the round, this new bulletin 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:
- Two sides of the FDE debate, from the evolution to the elimination of the forward-deployed model
- ScribeUp's $13m Series A to help consumers cancel recurring payments
- Mural's $15m raise to provide fintechs with compliance infrastructure
- Helium Ventures' acquisition of Jitsu
To FDE or not FDE? That is the question for enterprise AI
AuxoAI raised US$20.7 million in its Series A to scale its forward-deployed model for enterprise AI.
The start-up said the round was led by NTTVC with participation from "prominent technology executives and strategic investors", including ServiceNow's president, chief product officer and chief operating officer Amit Zavery; George Still Jr., Partner Emeritus at Norwest Venture Partners and a board member at Workday; and Giacomo Sonnino, managing director at Charlesbank Capital Partners and former COO of QuantumBlack North America.
With more than 40 customers already on the books, AuxoAI's business model is centered on forward deployed experts, a role that blends the forward deployed strategist with engineering capabilities. Seconded specialists work alongside the customer's business to understand how work actually happens, capture enterprise context, identify ways to reimagine work, and build production AI that gets used.
AuxoAI said it accelerates time to value with its proprietary FDE Workbench, Damia, which has codified intelligence for several enterprise AI deployments. Earlier this year, the start-up was confirmed as an AI Pureplay Partner for the Gemini Enterprise Transformation program, part of Google's $750Mn investment in enterprise AI deployment.
The latest funding round will support AuxoAI's expansion of global talent, allowing investment in proprietary technology and AI-native delivery capabilities, and allowing it to scale its presence and strategic ecosystem.
The FDE model has gained significant ground year-to-date, with the likes of Microsoft and AWS ploughing billions into the concept. But not everybody is sold.
Reindeer AI this week unveiled Evolve, its flagship platform for building enterprise AI agents, to "break enterprise AI's dependence on armies of FDEs".
Reindeer says enterprise AI has "a fundamental scaling problem". Specifically, too many systems require costly, ongoing human intervention to deliver the promised level of automation. FDEs an get individual agents running, but "the economics become unsustainable as businesses scale from a handful of agents to hundreds operating across constantly evolving systems and workflows".
To solve this, Reindeer's Self Evolve enables AI agents to begin working with partial knowledge and build expertise through real-world experience, rather than requiring engineers to anticipate every scenario before deployment.
ScribeUp raises $13m Series A to bring modern bill management solutions to financial institutions
US-based ScribeUp raised a $10 million in its Series A round led by Curql and also supported by Mucker Capital and Service Ventures.
The solution is built on agentic technology that allows users to take any relevant biller action, on any tracked bill, directly from the end-user's banking experience. It goes beyond simply alerting a banking customer when a bill is due – whether that means canceling a forgotten subscription, updating a payment form, accessing an advance or refinancing an external loan.
"Recurring payments are the most frequent interaction a consumer has with their money and the one consumers understand the least," said Jordan Mackler, CEO and co-founder of ScribeUp. "ScribeUp gives financial institutions the ability to not only surface subscriptions and bills, but to resolve them directly from their banking experience. That's the difference between a dashboard and a relationship. Institutions that win the recurring layer win a user's spend and banking primacy. This financing accelerates our ability to put that capability in front of millions more consumers."
ScribeUp already works with more than 60 banks, credit unions, fintechs and neobanks and is pre-integrated with major digital banking platforms. Its technology can be deployed through SDK, iframe or API, enabling institutions to add recurring bill capabilities without building the infrastructure themselves.
The Series A – comprising $10 million in equity financing and a $3 million venture debt facility – will support the start-up's investment in AI-native intelligence and agentic execution, making the platform more valuable to consumers and financial institutions. It will also fund continued team expansion and GTM strategies.
Mural raises $15m in Series A to provide fintechs with compliance infrastructure
Mural raised $15 million in a recent Series A led by Tether, the issuer of the USDT stablecoin, with North Island Ventures and existing investors also supporting. The latest raise brings its total funding to $28 million.
Mural is building a single platform for international payments and provides fintechs and software companies with centralized infrastructure for managing accounts, payments, identity verification, permissions, and regulatory compliance, allowing them to eliminate the dozens of different and unconnected tools they depend on to offer financial products to their customers.
The start-up was founded by ex-Palantir engineers Sinclair Toffa and Chris Fernandes in 2022, who worked to integrate disconnected systems for Fortune 100 companies. Mural builds on this premise with a dedicated focus on financial systems.
It now counts 30 employees across offices in New York, Denver, and Bogotá, and several Latin American countries.
Segment rival Jitsu acquired by Helium Ventures
Jitsu, an open-source customer data platform (CDP) and Segment alternative, has been acquired by Helium Ventures for an undisclosed sum.
Jitsu collects event data from websites, apps and servers and sends it to data warehouses and business tools in real time. It was founded in 2020 and participated in Y Combinator's Summer 2020 (S20) cohort. It raised $2 million in Seed funding led by Costanoa Ventures.
Helium was founded by Rohit Mittal and Priyank Singh, who previously co-founded Stilt, and its portfolio includes InsurGrid, Maroo and That's The One.
Jitsu co-founder and CEO Vladimir Klimontovich, said: "We built Jitsu to give data teams control over their customer data and the freedom to run it on their own terms. Rohit and Priyank share that belief and bring hands-on experience building and operating software businesses. With Helium investing in engineering, support and integrations, we can deliver more for our customers and give partners a stronger platform to build on while preserving the open-source foundation that brought them to Jitsu."
Mittal added: "Our investment in Jitsu is focused on the work customers and partners do every day: keeping events flowing, connecting more tools and resolving problems quickly. The releases since the acquisition show that direction in practice. We will keep building on Jitsu's open-source foundation so teams can grow with the product and choose how they run it."
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
- Qualtrics leverages Press Ganey's data for healthcare debut