Every CX start-up funding deal you need to know: September 25

Every week, CX Network publishes the top start-up funding news from the CX and customer service space, with details of how much has been raised and who backed the round. 

As a result, this bulletin gives practitioners an overview of the biggest innovations in CX and customer service capabilities – and an idea of where the wider vendor market may go next. 

This week's bulletin covers:

• ElevenLabs' plan to raise US$500m in its Series E following CRO and CFO appointments
• Kastle's $24m Series A round
• Heidi Health's $100m Series C
• Baselayer's $35m Series A
• Sela raises $21m to mimic top sales performers for voice automated mortgage calls
• Within's undisclosed capital raise from Accenture Ventures 

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ElevenLabs sets $500m target for Series E following CRO and CFO appointments 

According to reports, ElevenLabs is targeting a US$500 million raise for its forthcoming Series E, from Scaleup Europe Fund. 

The London-headquartered start-up backed by Matthew McConaughey, specializes in conversational AI and synthetic voice tools for dubbing, conversational agents and audio production.

Bloomberg said this week that Scaleup Europe Fund is in talks with ElevenLabs to lead the round although both parties have declined to comment. The Scaleup Europe Fund  is backed by EQT and the European Commission. 

ElevenLabs raised $500 million in its February 2026 Series D round, led by Sequoia Capital, taking its valuation to $11 billion. 

Since then, a new CRO and CFO have been appointed. 

Ashley Kramer has been named chief revenue officer on September 2, after leaving her role as enterprise sales lead at OpenAI. Earlier in her career, she held senior leadership roles across sales, marketing and product at GitLab, Alteryx and Tableau, all of which saw significant increases in customers and revenue during her tenure.

On September 8, ElevenLabs named Ethan Tandowsky as chief financial officer. 

Tandowsky most recently held the role of CFO at Adyen, the payments company that provides critical infrastructure to many of the world's largest enterprises. 

He helped take that company public in 2018, before becoming CFO in 2023. During his time there, Adyen grew from 400 to 5,000 people, expanded into new international markets and increased revenue 20x.

Kastle raises $24m in Series A led by Insight Partners

Kastle raised $24 million in its Series A round, led by Insight Partners with continued participation from existing investors Y Combinator and Commerce Ventures and new investors including Fifth Wall and "a group of prominent founders and financial services executives". 

The two-year-old San Francisco start-up is building the AI workforce for financial services, beginning with consumer lending, and to date, its AI agents have processed more than $1.8 billion in transactions.

Kastle will use the capital to expand its engineering, product and go-to-market (GTM) teams; deepen the capabilities of its platform; and accelerate deployments with leading banks and other financial institutions across North America.

Through its agents, Kastle proposes a new operating model for financial services: hybrid teams in which AI agents handle high-volume, repeatable work, while people focus on complex cases requiring judgment, expertise, empathy and relationships. 
Kastle's agents complete work inside the institution's existing processes and controls, giving organizations additional capacity while helping their teams maintain consistency, oversight and compliance.

"Financial institutions do not need another layer of software that creates more work for their teams," said Rebecca Liu-Doyle, MD at Insight Partners. "They need AI that can reliably complete the work while ensuring compliance. Kastle deploys AI agents that can navigate complexity, pass the bar on regulatory rigor and get high-stakes work done without waiting for a multiyear transformation. We're thrilled to partner with the Kastle team as they continue to reshape this category."

Australia's Heidi Health raises $340m 

Heidi Health raised $100 million in its Series C, with the round led by Blackbird and supported by previous investors Phoenix Court, Point72 Private Investments and Headline. 

The Series C values Heidi at $900 million, but is not the end of the story. Heidi has also secured a $240 million growth investment, bringing the total new funding to US$340 million.

The start-up developed AI software that transcribes clinical encounters and generates notes, summaries and follow-up materials. It will use the Series C funds to expand its capabilities beyond patient visits, moving from documentation into supervised action and giving clinicians more time back for care. The growth investment was led by General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund and provides large-scale GTM investment capacity to support Heidi's rapid growth and scale.

"From the day I started Heidi, the ambition was always bigger than writing doctor's notes. I imagined that AI would sit alongside clinicians and complete real work under their supervision," said co-founder and CEO Dr Thomas Kelly. "That's the shift we're now making: from documenting care to helping clinicians act on it. This round is about getting an AI Care Partner to every doctor in the world and putting clinicians back at the center of care with their patients."

Heidi is already utilized in 2.8 million patient visits a week in 190 countries.
In the US, Heidi is used by Beth Israel Lahey Health, one of the largest health systems in Massachusetts. In the UK, it has become the sole supplier for NHS England Midlands, the largest clinical AI procurement in NHS history. In Australia, deployments include The Royal Children's Hospital Melbourne, Children's Health Queensland Hospital and Health Service and Metro South Health. In New Zealand, Heidi was deployed across every emergency department in the country.

Baselayer raises $35m from M13 in Series A

New York-based start-up Baselayer, which provides identity verification and fraud-risk assessments for financial institutions, including credentials that verify AI agents, closed its Series A round with $35 million.

The round was led by M13, with Picus Capital, Torch Capital and Afore Capital. Socure, another start-up, also backed Baselayer. As CX Network reported in August, Socure uses AI and machine learning to help banks, fintechs and government agencies verify identities to approve real customers without latency and prevent fraud. 

The round marks the first dedicated capital injection into Know Your Agent identity infrastructure, which is the layer that lets banks, merchants and platforms verify which AI agent they are dealing with, who it represents and whether it is authorized to act. The funding round news broke within hours of six global banks publishing a framework for secure and trustworthy agent payments. 

Founded in 2024 by machine learning pioneer Timothy Hyde and risk management veteran Jonathan Awad, Baselayer has raised a reported $40 million to date and says it has prevented more than $1 billion in fraud losses. 

Awad, who is CEO, said: "Every era of commerce has required a new trust layer, but historically that infrastructure gets built only after fraud and abuse make the problem impossible to ignore.

"Agentic commerce is moving too fast for the industry to repeat that mistake. We already help one in five U.S. financial institutions answer, 'Can I trust this business?' Now we're building the infrastructure they need to answer, 'Can I trust this agent, who does it represent and what is it allowed to do?'"

Sela raises $21m to mimic top sales performers for voice automated mortgage calls

Sela raised $21 million in its Series A round, led by Costanoa and supported by Emergence Capital.

Sela is developing AI voice agents that automate mortgage sales calls and connect borrowers with loan officers when required. Its AI agents help loan officers originate more than $1 billion in new mortgages per month. 

Having crossed the $10 million annualized run-rate revenue milestone in only 18 months, the San Francisco-based start-up will use the new funds to grow its team and continue to develop agents that guide borrowers through the entire consumer finance journey.

Sela's AI agents take the best performing sales behaviors, learned across tens of millions of calls and employ them consistently across every customer interaction. In one A/B test conducted by an existing client, Sela produced a nine percent increase in lead-to-lock rates, yielding more than 40 percent higher profit for the lender than their existing process.

In another A/B test with a top-five mortgage servicer, Sela outperformed another voice AI solution by 41 percent on a lead-to-lock basis, across more than 7,000 leads.

Nate Becker, co-founder and CEO, said: "Automating the mortgage process with AI doesn't actually help anyone unless it improves the experience for consumers and makes the process more effective for lenders. We have built a system that does both of these things, and we've proven it works at scale. 

"In the next 12 months, our AI agents will run more of the mortgage sales process, as we aim to make financial decisions less anxiety-inducing, more pleasant, cheaper and easier for consumers," he continued. 

Within raises undisclosed sum from Accenture Ventures 

Within has received an undisclosed sum from Accenture Ventures, as part of a collaboration intended to help clients gain deeper insight into how work gets done, identify opportunities to enhance performance, deploy AI agents and unlock ongoing productivity and efficiency gains.

Within solves a specific – and painful – problem for businesses looking to push through their AI transformation. The as-is processes, exceptions and workarounds that shape day-to-day operations are rarely documented, meaning AI often lacks the context it needs to understand the requirements, impacting everything from project scope to ROI.

Within's platform captures how employees work across all applications and tracks undocumented offline interactions, including processes, handoffs and exceptions.

The platform automatically compiles that information into Within's Work Brain, the continuously updated context layer of work that AI agents need to succeed. As information updates with the business, organizations can use it to build AI agents, identify automation opportunities and improve workflows across finance, HR, sales, marketing, customer service, IT, supply chain, procurement and commercial operations.

By mapping real-time decisions, handoffs and workarounds that evade official documentation (if any exists), Within enables AI agents to deliver real, measurable ROI.

"One of the most persistent challenges in AI transformation is that organizations often don't have a clear picture of the starting point," said Jason Dess, Accenture's industry and process reinvention lead. "Without that understanding, it's difficult to scale AI beyond isolated use cases."

Quick links

• Every VC CX deal you need to know: September 18
• Every VC CX deal you need to know: September 11
• Every VC CX deal you need to know: September 4