When Chief Product Officer for the AI ​​customer support -Startup Talkdesk said Charanya “CK” Kannan that corporations often say that they wish to automate different workflows, but it surely is absolutely difficult to implement AI. Companies are coping with chunky legacy software that usually has no APIs and making a discouraging task that didn’t prioritize their IT departments.
“Every company we spoke to had 50 to 1,000 automation inquiries from various teams to whom they were simply never reached,” said Kannan (shown in the highest right) towards Techcrunch. “It just doesn't make sense. You mustn’t have a 1000-line element automation behind today. You should have the opportunity to do it in a short time. “
This realization became an impetus behind Kannan's recent startup PinkfishWhat helps Enterprise customers to construct AI agents and other AI-controlled workflows through natural voice requests. The software has greater than 200 integrations equivalent to Salesforce and Zendesk and focuses on the deterministic execution, which implies that the identical user request achieves the identical result each time.
Kannan said Pinkfish tried a distinct approach as a competitor when selling to corporations. Pinkfish, as an alternative of accelerating its platform as a golden ticket for automation of each workflow, calls for corporations to try the software, only to automate one or two different workflows first. “They start there after which they go from two to 4, from 10 to twenty and hopefully 1,000 (automations by pinkfish),” she said.
So far, this strategy has paid off. Pinkfish was launched in January 2024 in Stealth with Kannan as CEO and co -founder Ben Rigby as Chief Product and Technology Officer (CPTO). The company focuses on some areas, including retail and services, and has ended up a whole bunch of users and company customers, including IPSY, Elevate and Talkdesk.
Kannan said that many start-ups for workflow automation wish to help corporations cut out a few of the “additional” features of a job, e.g. B. the automation of market research or weight reduction of potential sales regulations, but Pinkfish focuses on mission -critical workflows.
She gave the instance of IPSY, a make -up subscription service. One of the primary workflows used to automate Pinkfish was his price request, which was previously supplied by a team of three. This team should maintain every request, no matter whether it got here overnight or on weekends. Kannan now said that the complete means of pinkfish goes.
“It's so mission critical,” said Kannan. “If Pinkfish screws up somewhere, you advise you, your prices are usually not in your website. They leave money on the table. “
Now Pinkfish Techcrunch exclusively said that it seems to be stealth and picked up a round of $ 7.6 million in front of the seed with Norwest Venture Partners with the participation of Storm ventures and fishing investors.
Scott Beechuk, a partner at Norwest who will take a board seat in Pinkfish, told Techcrunch that he had known Kannan at Talkdesk since his time and could be a consultant of assorted portfolio corporations in Norwest.
Beechuk said Techcrunch that he was obsessed with supporting the corporate because he believes that Kannan and Rigby have the best balance of understanding the underlying technology and understanding the client base with a view to stand out in an overcrowded AI agent landscape.
“You start with a variety of essential logos and pay customers who discover a real ROI.
Kannan also believes that pinkfish stands out from competitors because customers can use natural language to request the system and at the identical time use the entire code within the background to create these AI workflows. She said that a low code has been popular for years and continues to be for a few of her competitors, she believes that he has grow to be too restrictive in the current day and is effectively “dead”.
She added that corporations wouldn’t wish to select from a variety of pre-coded constructing blocks, but would have an answer that might give them access to a comprehensive baking-end, but with an easier user interface. If the AI ​​agent market is increasingly overcrowded, it hopes that the message will resonate.
“How can we bring the mission -critical, complex use cases tangible? By earthing it with the agent and determinism and contributing a platform with the best level of guardrails for all of those connections, ”said Kannan. “I believe these are the 2 areas that we predict in another way.”
