Staircase AI, a pioneer in relationship intelligence, announced the completion of its $4 million seed round today. The company received funding from StageOne Ventures, a VC fund focused on solving large enterprise challenges, and Disruptive AI, an early-stage VC that specializes in artificial intelligence (AI).

“We are very excited that StageOne Ventures and Disruptive AI have placed their confidence in Staircase AI,” said Ori Entis, co-founder and CEO of Staircase AI. “Only an AI-based system that fuses and analyzes large amounts of customer data can provide the deep insights needed to help companies better understand, retain and grow their customers. This investment will help us scale our engineering and accelerate our go-to-market plans.”

Staircase AI uses advanced machine learning to analyze thousands of digital engagements between companies and their existing customers. It runs 24x7 to provide Customer Success (CS) teams the peace of mind knowing that it will detect anomalies and trends while providing predictions and recommendations. The system identifies whether a champion or decision-maker is putting the entire account at risk. Staircase AI will alert team members to the change, and direct them to move forward. CS leaders are trying to understand how to quickly adjust their playbooks. Without advanced data science capabilities, this is impossible.    

The company was founded by Ori Entis and Lior Harel and is based in the US with an R&D team in Israel. While managing a CS team responsible for generating over a hundred million dollars in annual recurring revenue, Entis realized he lacked visibility into both the health of the client relationship and into the relationships his team members had with their counterparts.

To improve his understanding of customer status and team performance, Entis began reading through existing correspondence and was quickly able to determine which accounts were on solid ground and which were at-risk. He worked with Harel to develop a natural language processing AI tool that could scale across hundreds of thousands of messages and automatically analyze correspondence – including sentiment, engagement, and conversation topics – from any channel.

“It is the magic of AI to disrupt the Customer Success paradigm – with superhuman capabilities over millions of data points, relationships could be managed greatly”, said Yorai Fainmesser, General Partner at Disruptive AI. “Staircase AI can help enterprises ramp up their relationships in a click, scale their ability to assess a customer, and drive annual recurring revenue to record levels.”

“Customer Success teams struggle with complex, many-to-many relationships with their clients, and lacking intelligent analytics tools, they have been unable to effectively nurture and expand their relationship to the full potential,” said Yuval Cohen, Managing Partner at StageOne Ventures. “Through relationship intelligence powered by Staircase AI, companies can determine whether they are ready to upgrade their service, maintain their existing service level, or are at churn risk.”

Staircase Relationship Intelligence (SRI) will set the bar for AI-driven customer analytics that help customer success managers gain insight into their teams’ activities.