Hiring has already begun and will continue ‘over the coming months’, founder Mark Hughes tells SiliconRepublic.com.

Y Combinator-backed and Irish-founded start-up Solidroad has announced a $25m Series A round led by UK investment firm Hedosophia.

The San Francisco-headquartered start-up offers companies an AI-powered quality assurance and training platform that reviews customer interactions to locate improvement points. This data can also be repurposed to create training simulations.

“Companies handle hundreds of thousands of customer conversations every day, but most can’t tell how well those interactions are actually going. Metrics like response times or ticket volumes don’t capture the actual quality of the experience,” co-founder and CEO Mark Hughes told SiliconRepublic.com.

As AI takes on routine requests, escalated conversations that reach humans tend to be complex and emotionally charged, Hughes noted. This raises the bar needed for human agents, putting pressure on coaching.

“We provide an independent quality layer across every customer interaction, so companies can evaluate performance consistently against their own standards.”

The new funding, as well as a $6.5m seed round in June last year, will help the start-up expand its teams across Dublin and San Francisco.

“We’re really focused on scaling … to meet a clear shift in the market,” said Hughes. Solidroad currently employs 20. The next wave of hiring has begun and will continue “over the coming months”.

“As demand grows from enterprises looking for better visibility and control over both human and AI-led customer interactions, expanding our team is critical to meeting that need and continuing to raise the quality bar across the industry,” the CEO said.

In 2025, the then two-year-old start-up said it had around 50 customers, a number which has since grown a “ton”, according to the CEO. Solidroad works with the likes of Crypto.com, Ryanair and Oura.

“Across all of our customers, we typically see a 20pc increase in quality assurance coverage and 90pc reduction in manual review time,” Hughes said.

Hughes previously founded Gradguide, a coaching and mentorship network for college graduates, in 2019. The company raised $2m before being acquired in 2022. Co-founder Patrick Finlay previously co-founded Monaru, which helped product and marketing teams build in-app experiences.

Solidroad, founded by the two in 2023, joined the Y Combinator accelerator as part of its winter 2025 cohort. Finlay’s previous venture was a part of a previous edition of the accelerator.

Hughes said his biggest lesson take-away as a founder was “learning the difference between a product people find interesting and one they actually need”.

On his experience at Y Combinator, he said: “I also quickly learned how to differentiate between what will actually make an impact versus what’s just a trend.”

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