Ducky Raises $2.7M Pre-Seed to put AI to work for Customer Support teams

Hello, world! We’re Hong and James, the co-founders of Ducky.

Today, we’re thrilled to announce Ducky’s launch as well as our $2.7M pre-seed fundraise led by Penny Jar Capital, with participation from Bread & Butter Ventures, NOMO Ventures and a number of amazing angels.

Ducky is committed to building the world’s best Customer Support AI to work alongside and augment the amazing humans that hustle all day to help solve customer problems. We started Ducky based on a shared fascination with the intersection of human communication and the accessibility of knowledge.

We believe humans are inherently collaborative, empathetic and creative. We also believe that recent advancements in AI technology are merely the beginning of the greatest technological and lifestyle shift of our age.

Lofty, no? A little self-important for a company called “Ducky?” We think not.

As humans, we spend a great deal of our working lives on the hunt for information. Sometimes we know where the information is, sometimes we don’t. Sometimes, we don’t even know for certain if the information exists. More often than not, information is a pre-requisite for decision-making — making accessibility all the more crucial.

Another large portion of our working lives is spent on repetitive tasks. Things we could do in our sleep, if only we could sleepwalk reliably. These types of tasks take precious time and energy away from what customer support agents are incredible at: empathizing with and solving problems alongside customers.

Currently, knowledge & information are structured in an unsustainable and inaccessible format. If you’ve ever had 19 tabs open across 11 SaaS tools… you know what we’re talking about. Humans are not search engines, nor are we libraries. Now, more than ever, we’re librarians — it’s not about knowing something, but rather about knowing how to find and make use of that something. Knowledge is everywhere, but it’s kept in disparate systems with limited connectivity.

Customer Support professionals operate in a fast-paced, demanding, often reactive, atmosphere where they are required to find and make sense of very specific information in live time. In addition to discovering and understanding that specific information, they’re also responsible for understanding most parts of the business. Customer support has frequent communication with engineering, product, sales, operations and more…  On top of all of this, support professionals also have to empathize with clients and those clients are not always kind.

As we spoke with top-notch support teams to validate the need for Ducky, we realized that the best Customer Support teams do three things really well:

1. They accurately communicate specific information to customers and set reasonable expectations.
2. They are empathetic and take the time to connect with their clients on a human level.
3. They treat clients like partners and genuinely want to solve problems.

So, if the above is the paragon of Customer Support, how do we help all teams do that? We think the playbook is thus:

1. Take away the blockers (knowledge access and connectivity)
2. Automate the repetitious tasks (reduce the mundane)
3. Build new tools to encourage empathetic and efficient communication (fuel for fulfilling problem solving)

At this stage in the AI revolution, AI is more powerful with humans in the loop, and humans are more powerful when augmented by well-implemented AI. By using AI to remove the knowledge barrier and automate repetitious tasks, we free up time to allow humans to focus on communication and empathy. We no longer need to remember every detail with real-time discovery, AI can do that for us. When paired with people, AI delivers key information so humans can intuitively use that information, in a specific context, to deliver a better outcome than AI or humans can create in isolation.

When you pair knowledge assistance with the automation of repetitive tasks, the combination of human + AI creates the foundation for the greatest productivity unlock of our age. True value exists in the sum of AI + humans, working together.

We wouldn’t be where we are today without the support of incredible friends, peers, family, early partners, and investors. We appreciate y’all and are grateful to have you on this journey with us.

And thus, Ducky is born. Happy birthday to you, Ducky. Here’s to many more.

Ducky Raises $2.7M Pre-Seed to put AI to work for Customer Support teams — Yahoo Finance.