Solidroad lands $25M to bring AI to customer support interactions

Solidroad Inc., a startup that develops software for use in training and coaching customer service agents, today said it has raised $25 million in an early-stage funding.

The Series A round, led by U.K.-based Hedosophia Services Ltd., comes as enterprises are seeking ways to improve customer experience while managing rising support volumes and the growing use of AI agents in service environments.

The company’s platform automatically evaluates all customer interactions across human and AI agents to identify risks and skills gaps, and to offer personalized coaching in real time. Its approach centers on applying consistent evaluation standards across all customer interactions, said co-founder and Chief Executive Mark Hughes.

“Traditional people-based quality assurance teams are inherently subjective with different reviewers interpreting standards differently,” Hughes said. “Our system uses AI that sticks to a customized rubric, which means it’s evaluating everything at the same standard with the same guidelines.”

Rather than applying a uniform model across customers, the platform allows each organization to define its own quality criteria, including tone, policy compliance and interaction standards.

“We don’t apply a generic rubric to every company,” Hughes said. “Each customer determines their own quality standards. This includes criteria like what a good interaction looks like, what policies need to be followed and what tone fits their brand.” That approach enables large-scale consistency, even at high volumes, he said.

Hughes cited one customer that’s running more than 800,000 conversations a month through Solidroad, with each one scored against a set of company-defined standards. “That level of uniformity isn’t possible with manual reviews,” he said.

Real-time trainine

Solidroad says a key differentiator in its technology is the platform’s ability to translate evaluation data directly into training interventions.

“Most tools stop at the scorecard,” Hughes said. “Where and how an agent might have missed the mark is useful information, but it puts the burden on the company to figure out what to do about it.”

Solidroad instead integrates evaluation and training into a single workflow to “close the loop automatically,” Hughes said. “When Solidroad identifies a gap, whether it’s a human agent struggling with a particular scenario or an AI agent drifting off-policy, we generate a realistic simulation tied to that specific issue.”

Targeted exercises are designed to replicate real-world scenarios, enabling agents to practice and improve before engaging with customers.

“So instead of flagging ‘this agent needs work on billing disputes’ and leaving it there, the agent gets a targeted exercise that mirrors the exact type of conversation they struggled with,” Hughes said.

Early customers have seen improved customer satisfaction scores and reduced resolution times, Hughes said. Lead management vendor Podium Corp. “started resolving customer issues 33% faster after going through our training simulations, and new hires were reaching performance benchmarks in half the time.” Customers have also seen up to a 90% reduction in manual review hours and a twenty-fold increase in coverage, Hughes said.

He acknowledged that adopting automated quality assurance requires operational changes.

“You need to define what ‘good’ looks like for your company: your quality criteria, your policies and your brand standards,” he said. “Some teams also need to rethink how quality assurance managers spend their time, because the job shifts from reviewing individual conversations to analyzing trends and coaching at a higher level.”

Hughes said many organizations lack a unified approach today.

“They’re monitoring human agents with one process, and AI agents with another, and that creates gaps in visibility across the system,” Hughes said. Solidroad’s platform “creates a single, consistent view of quality across human and AI interactions, allowing teams to identify issues early and close gaps before they reach customers.”

Solidroad, which is based in Dublin, Ireland, with offices in San Francisco, plans to use the new funding to expand its product capabilities and its workforce as demand grows for tools that can scale customer support quality alongside automation.

Photo: Freepik