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We’re excited to have led Lorikeet’s Seed round, with participation from Skip Capital and strategic angel investors from the US, including Stripe’s ex-COO, Claire Johnson, the COO of Linear, Cristina Cordova, Bob Van Winden, the ex-Head of Support at Stripe, and executives from Brex, Rippling, OpenAI, and Retool.
We’re thrilled to join Steve, Jamie, and the Lorikeet team as they build the world’s best workflow automation engine for complex customer support.
Having worked with the team since the company’s formation in 2023, we’ve been blown away by their speed of execution, the customer love they’ve generated, and their unique approach to a category growing exponentially around them.
How we came to work with Lorikeet
We met Steve Hind, Lorikeet’s Co-founder and CEO, as he explored moving from San Francisco to Sydney about a year ago through another founder in our portfolio. In our first few conversations, we were struck by his outlier intellect, incredible career as a top performer at BCG, Harvard Business School, Bridgewater, Stripe and Watershed, and his clear ambition to build a globally relevant, AI-native product. What was more impressive was how the people who worked with him all had amazing things to say about him and his scope of ambition. He believed in the Australian SaaS story and believed he could build one of the next generational Australian businesses.
Very quickly, Steve was joined by Jamie Hall as CTO and Co-founder. Jamie was one of the original research engineers on Google’s Bard project. An Economics PhD and former central banker at the RBA, Jamie’s career in tech started at Kaggle before their acquisition by Google. Steve and Jamie have since started to build one of the best technical teams in Australia, including attracting high-calibre talent to their foundational engineering team from Stripe, Atlassian, Dropbox, Canva and Dovetail.
What Lorikeet is doing and why it is special: The challenge inherent to customer support, and how Lorikeet is fixing it
The Lorikeet team started their journey by building an operating system for operations teams: a system of record to understand their business, improve it, and communicate the work more effectively to leadership. Along the way, they realised that AI was capable of being more than a copilot - it could do the ops work directly and create more impact in doing so.
Every customer support leader faces the same trade-off: how do you scale high-quality support that's delivered in a timely manner and at a cost that doesn’t massively inhibit unit economics? Nailing one is hard for some teams, and nailing two is even more challenging. But solving for all three has, until now, been impossible. Many complex businesses spend 10-15% of their top line on some form of customer support, and there is huge pressure on customer support leaders, COOs, and CFOs to drive this number down.
Lorikeet is solving this calculus. The team has built a customer support workflow automation engine that can be deeply embedded into companies’ tooling stacks. It helps automate any workflow a support agent can perform near-instantly and in a tone of voice reflective of the brand. Unlike the long list of basic AI chatbots that can only help with simple questions, Lorikeet acts as a fully customised and perfect support agent: it checks internal systems of record, triggers actions based on what it finds, and quickly delivers both answers and outcomes to customers. And unlike competitors’ “agentic” models, which involve the AI building its own stochastic execution path at runtime, Lorikeet can reliably execute the perfect workflow every time.
Support leaders at Lorikeet’s customers—including Australian health-tech Eucalyptus or US fintech unicorn Step—report similar or higher CSAT to human agents at a fraction of the speed and cost. Lorikeet is also working with many more fast-growing financial services and healthcare customers who require a product that can handle additional complexity. Many of their customers have come through competitive RFP processes against the likes of ZenDesk and Intercom’s AI agent products.
Where to next for Lorikeet?
Lorikeet believes that customer support is a product challenge. If your product had no problems, you’d have no need for support. And if you had sufficient product resources to productise resolutions to your inbound support questions, you’d not need customer support teams in the first place.
With the funds raised in this round, Lorikeet is well on its way to bridging this gap, working with the product, engineering, and operations teams at leading fintech and health tech companies to deliver amazing customer support faster and more efficiently than ever before.
This round will support the team's continued expansion into the US market. A third of Lorikeet’s customers are in the US, and Steve and Jamie have just started growing their team on the ground in the US.
The Lorikeet team is on the lookout to meet like-minded product and support leaders and is hiring founding engineers. To learn more visit: lorikeetcx.ai
