Brainfish nets $3.85 million to tackle customer support challenges

Sydney AI startup Brainfish has raised $3.85 million at an undisclosed valuation in its latest funding round. According to the company, it has seen 65% month-on-month growth since launching in April 2023.

The round was led by Peak XV Partners’ Surge, with contributions from Macdoch Ventures, Black Sheep Capital, Justus Hammer (CEO of MadPaws) and several angel investors

To date, Brainfish has raised $5 million in capital in just over 12 months.

Brainfish aims to transform customer support, arguing that the sector hasn’t changed significantly in decades.

“Whilst tooling is better, people today want quick answers that are accurate and contextualised,” Daniel Kimber, CEO and co-founder of Brainfish said to SmartCompany.

“We’re able to continue pushing the boundaries of customer support and save businesses countless hours by delivering a superior product that works from the very top of the customer funnel. Bad bot answers just won’t suffice anymore.”

Brainfish’s platform is designed to resolve customer inquiries instantly. It is said to do this by combining a business’ knowledge base with AI-driven contextual understanding.

The goal is to deliver a more personalised and efficient brand of customer service. This technology also boasts the ability to enable businesses to handle high volumes of customer queries with increased efficiency and quality.

Kimber also revealed the company has built an agent assistant that works across Slack and Chrome extensions to assist staff and support teams in getting instant answers for customers.

“We have strong testimonials from customers on how we’ve been able to help their support teams transition from being a reactive function, to proactive with their customer base, enabling them to act more like relationship managers with customers, rather than firefighters,” Kimber said.

At present, Brainfish services 300,000 users globally – including the likes of Airtasker and Mad Paws. It currently operates across Australia, the US, and Singapore but is planning further expansion.

The company reports a robust 65% month-on-month growth since its market entry and currently services over 300,000 users globally, including clients such as ASX-listed companies Mad Paws and Airtasker. It operates in multiple regions, including Australia, the US, and Singapore.

Brainfish addresses the crowded market and security concerns

Over the last 18 months, the AI market has become increasingly crowded, including AI-powered customer support solutions. Kimber says Brainfish is different due to its generative search, content and user journey analytics.

“Our specific focus on self-service makes us unique in the market, in that we’re not trying to just build a slightly better chatbot — we’re building a unique customer experience for every individual customer using AI,” Kimber said.

But as AI technologies increasingly influence customer interactions, there’s growing concern about ethical implications, particularly when it comes to data privacy and AI biases.

Kimber has confirmed that Brainfish is across this, securing ISO27001 and SOC2 Type II certifications and moving the majority of the models in-house to provide greater control over the inputs and outputs.

“The nature of our product enables us to focus primarily on the product of a business and their content, so we are using AI for its linguistic capability in translating complex products for any type of customer,” Kimber said.

“We also now have a suite of in-house guardrails and safety mechanisms that protect answers from being generated depending on if questions contain PII data or sensitive information.”

Looking ahead, Brainfish has confirmed with SmartCompany that the fresh cash injection will be split between product R&D and accelerating its international expansion.

“We also have a strong focus on leveraging trade shows and events as part of our go-to market strategy — as this enables us to show up for enterprise, and build trust at a much more accelerated pace,” Kimber said.

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