Ada - Why We Invested

Today we are excited to be supporting the Ada co-founders, Mike and David, and the entire team to pursue their vision of becoming a global leader in automated customer service.

The journey to this $19 million Series A financing was anything but a straight line. When we first met Mike and David they were working on Volley, a community for likeminded professionals to connect and help each other get stuff done. This was an important problem to solve, but a far cry from the automated customer service platform Ada is today.

Although Volley was out of our investment scope (being in consumer), we saw something special in Mike and David. Here were two founders who had integrity and incredible focus on their pursuit to delight customers. They operated with a dogged intellectual curiosity and honesty that when applied methodically and consistently we knew would result in them finding a deep pain their customers had.

We were right but in an entirely different way than we expected, as is often the case in startups. Mike and David’s intuition to listen to their customers led them to the field of customer support. After hearing repeatedly that dealing with customer support at scale was a pain point for companies, they spent some humbling months as actual customer support reps, taking calls and resolving customer issues, truly feeling the pain these customers and employees felt first hand. Only after this experience were they able shift focus from Volley to create the first version of Ada, and things moved quickly from there.

We are not only excited to be supporting Ada because we have known Mike and David for some time now, but also because their vision for the future of customer support is audacious, compelling, and will make all of our lives as consumers and end users of customer support better.

Ada has rapidly grown to help its customers automate up to 70% of their customer interactions. We believe that as Ada’s library of integrations into other core enterprise systems grows, they will be able to go beyond automating customer inquiries into automating customer actions, significantly improving the end customer experience. They are already doing this at some world leading brands like TELUS, Coinbase and Upwork, and have helped more than 50 million customers world wide through their platform.

While this financing is just one early milestone in a journey where we expect there to be many more, it is always important to pause and appreciate the series of events that brought the company to this point. Ada is a Canadian company that views diversity as a core competency and aspires to be globally relevant. They are well on their way to achieving this and we are excited to be helping them build and define the next generation of customer experiences.

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