Solidroad is part of the winter 2025 cohort at Y Combinator, a Silicon Valley start-up accelerator.
Irish AI start-up Solidroad has raised $6.5m in a seed funding round led by First Round Capital, with participation from Y Combinator. This brings the two-year-old start-up’s total raise to $8m.
Solidroad is a quality assurance and training platform for customer experience teams. The start-up targets companies that do not fully automate all of their customer interactions with artificial intelligence (AI). It reviews and aims to improve all customer interactions a business may have – human or AI.
Solidroad, which as founded in 2023 by Mark Hughes and Patrick Finlay, currently has more than 50 customers, including Crypto.com, workforce management SaaS platform Connecteam and the US-based telehealth clinic Fella and Delilah.
The Dublin-founded start-up, which raised $1.2m last year, recently moved headquarters to San Francisco to grow its business.
It has joined Y Combinator as part of its winter 2025 cohort of start-ups. Y Combinator is a prestigious Silicon Valley start-up accelerator that previously helped launch Stripe.
“We built Solidroad because we were tired of seeing CX [customer experience] teams treated like a cost centre and forced to duct tape together bloated, siloed tools,” wrote Hughes and Finlay in a blogpost announcing the raise.
CEO Hughes previously founded Gradguide, a coaching and mentorship network for recent college graduates, in 2019. The company raised $2m before being acquired in 2022.
While Finlay, the start-up’s chief technology officer, previously co-founded Monaru (now Unflow), which helped product and marketing teams build in-app experiences. Unflow was part of a previous cohort at the Y Combinator start-up accelerator.
Solidroad is hiring “aggressively”, the founders said, with several San Francisco-based senior level roles currently up for grabs.
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