This AI startup just raised $17 million from celebrity investors like Ashton Kutcher, P Diddy to take on customer service with artificial intelligence

We’ve all heard of chatbots, once promised to provide human-like customer service at much faster speeds. They later lost much of their hypes after customers found out that they could not completely replace human agents. However, one San Francisco-based tech startup is on a mission to save customer service from the clunky chatbots. Forethought is an AI startup that creates order, removes redundant work, and provides efficiency for businesses everywhere.

Forethought builds AI systems that boost customer support productivity by embedding information retrieval into existing workflows. In its first platform, Forethought is supercharging customer support organizations with a powerful natural language understanding platform called Agatha. Agatha, an AI-powered agent, helps the customer support team to automates the simple and assists with the complex. To date, Forethought said the company has resolved more than 500,000 claims automatically so far. And investors have taken notice.

This week, Forethought announced it’s raised $17 million in a Series B funding round from previous investor NEA, Sound Ventures, Neo, Geodesic Capital, and Operator Collective, alongside high-leverage individuals including Qualtrics CEO Ryan Smith, Sean “Diddy” Combs, and LL Cool J.

Founded in 2017 by CEO Deon Nicholas, Colm Doyle, and Sami Ghoche, Forethought’s flagship product, Agatha, is an AI-powered answer recommendation tool for customer support teams that has rapidly attracted the attention of both high-profile investors and enterprises looking to improve efficiency. Before founding Forethought, Deon, a Canadian, built products and infrastructure at Facebook, Palantir, Dropbox, and Pure Storage. He has ML publications and infrastructure patents, was a World Finalist at the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, and was named to Forbes 30 under 30.

“There are many ‘AI-powered’ software products that recommend answers for customer support,” Nicholas explained. “Agatha is unique in that it can leverage a wider range of inputs, not just your regular neatly-written help articles, but also your past help tickets, conversations, and emails, which are highly disorganized.”