Forethought develops AI products that assist customer service agents by surfacing information, automating simple responses, and routing inquiries to the most knowledgeable agent. Its core product suite includes Assist (knowledge surfacing), Solve (chatbot for simple answers and routing) and Triage (intelligent routing to specialist agents). The company says pandemic-driven digital transformation accelerated demand for its platform. In the past year Forethought reported 5x ARR growth and a tripling of its customer base. Headcount is 145 and the company expects to grow to around 250 employees by the end of next year. Management says the new capital will fund continued AI research, R&D, refinement of its customer-service focus and exploration of adjacent areas such as sales. Forethought develops AI and machine learning solutions for enterprise customer support, with its flagship product Agatha that learns from internal documents, email, chat and old support tickets. Agatha is designed to automatically resolve and auto-route tickets and surface the most relevant institutional knowledge. The company is led by co-founder and CEO Deon Nicholas. Forethought raised $17M in a Series B to expand operations and broaden its business reach. The funding reflects continued investor interest in its enterprise AI approach. No operating metrics were disclosed in the article. Forethought builds an AI-driven enterprise search system that moves beyond keyword matching to pull precise answers from a corpus of documents. The company launched publicly at TechCrunch Disrupt after a year in stealth and won the Disrupt Battlefield trophy in September. At launch its product can be embedded in Salesforce and Zendesk, with an initial focus on customer service. With new funding, the team plans to expand into other enterprise information-retrieval use cases. Since the public launch the three co-founders have added six employees and intend to hire more over the next year, particularly in machine learning, product and UX. The company announced a $9 million Series A to support those product and growth plans. Forethought’s core product, Agatha, is an AI-driven answer engine that indexes large document sets and uses NLP/NLU to read content like a human and surface the most relevant answers. The company has positioned Agatha first for customer support, integrating with help-desk platforms such as Zendesk and Salesforce Service Cloud to suggest answers and relevant knowledge-base articles. Forethought says Agatha can index millions of documents quickly and has increased agent efficiency by 20–30 percent in trials. The product debuted in private beta four months ago with six companies participating, one of which has converted to a paying customer. Forethought plans to expand Agatha beyond customer support to other enterprise workflows and to deliver the product as a cloud service where customers sign up and connect their support platforms for indexing. The team closed a pre-seed financing led by K9 Ventures and has founders and early employees in their mid-20s, with the company having launched last year.

Total raised

$91M

Funding rounds

4

Latest round

Series C

Latest activity

Dec 2021