Cue, an AI customer service startup, has raised $5 million in a funding round co-led by Knife Capital and FAM Investments, as businesses increasingly turn to autonomous AI agents to cut support costs while improving customer experience.
The fresh capital will fund the development of Cue’s next generation of AI agents, expand its presence beyond its core UK and South African markets, and strengthen its voice capabilities, security infrastructure and enterprise software integrations.
Founded in 2015, Cue provides a unified customer service platform that combines AI-powered agents with human support across channels including WhatsApp, webchat, email, SMS, voice and Messenger. The company says its platform serves more than 500 businesses spanning automotive, retail, financial services, insurance and education.
The funding comes as enterprises increasingly adopt generative AI to automate customer support functions that traditionally required human agents.
Cue said its annual recurring revenue (ARR) grew more than 160% year over year in its latest financial year, while its platform now processes more than 500 million customer messages and conversations annually.
“Our customers are increasingly looking for one platform rather than a collection of disconnected tools,” Chief Executive Richard Nischk said. “We’re at an inflection point for AI in customer service, where businesses want automation that can genuinely resolve customer problems, not simply respond to them.”
Unlike conventional chatbots that primarily answer questions, Cue is developing AI agents capable of completing entire customer service workflows. These include qualifying sales leads, updating customer accounts, booking appointments, checking order status and generating payment links without human intervention. When issues become more complex, conversations are transferred to human agents together with the full customer history.
The company said its current generation of AI agents can already resolve more than 60% of customer conversations autonomously, with the next generation expected to execute more complex tasks securely across multiple enterprise systems.
The investment reflects growing confidence among venture investors that AI agents will become central to enterprise software, particularly as advances in large language models improve reasoning and task execution.
“Customer service remains the lifeblood of every enduring business,” said Keet van Zyl, founding partner at Knife Capital. “As AI reshapes enterprise software, the winners will be companies that enhance human capability rather than replace it. Cue has demonstrated measurable value while building a platform capable of becoming a category leader.”
Cue plans to deploy the new funding across three areas: expanding engineering teams to build more capable autonomous AI agents and voice infrastructure; accelerating sales and marketing efforts in the UK, South Africa and new international markets; and broadening its platform with additional communication channels, enterprise integrations and analytics.
The company argues that customer service technology has historically evolved in silos, forcing businesses to manage separate systems for voice, email, messaging and social media. Its platform aims to consolidate those channels while allowing AI agents and human support teams to work together within a single interface.
As enterprises seek to balance automation with customer satisfaction, Cue is betting that hybrid AI-human support models will become the industry standard rather than fully automated systems.
The latest funding positions the company to compete in the rapidly expanding AI customer service market, where businesses are racing to deploy autonomous agents capable of resolving increasingly complex customer interactions while reducing operational costs. Cue in March 2024 raised $2 million seed round to accelerate its development of advanced AI capabilities within its customer service suite. In October the previuos year, it had raised raised $500,000 to deliver faster customer service using the next generation of LLM-powered AI models on the Cue platform.