The married founding duo’s company, 14.ai, replaces customer support teams at startups

The customer service industry is in a state of constant change, thanks to artificial intelligence. Investors and company leaders have sounded alarm bells for the BPO (business process outsourcing) industry. On the other hand, AI-driven customer support startups, such as Decagon, Parloa, and Sierra, have received millions of dollars in funding from venture capitalists.

14.ai, a startup backed by Y-Combinator, takes an approach to building an AI-driven agency that has replaced legacy customer support teams at many startups I’ve worked with.

The company has raised $3 million in seed funding led by Y Combinator with participation from General Catalyst, Base Case Capital, SV Angel, and the founders of Dropbox, Slack, Replit, and Vercel.

The startup was founded by married duo Mary Shennigans and Michael Pfister. The two met in Paris more than a decade ago and went on to build separate companies. Schneegans was one of the founders of the corporate intranet company Workwell. Pfister previously founded Snips, a company that worked on early native assistants for smart devices, which was acquired by Sonos in 2019.

After that, they wanted to build a company together, so they moved to the United States. The duo chose customer service as the problem to address, but they didn’t want to build a pure play SaaS company. They founded 14.ai to operate as an AI-driven customer support agency.

“We don’t build software for clients. 14.ai is an AI-driven customer service agency. We combine software and services into one package. For clients, running software is difficult, especially for customer service. We take over their entire operations, and use our suite specifically designed for customer service,” Pfister said.

The company said it can integrate with the support system within a day and start clearing the backlog of support tickets very quickly. It can monitor tickets across different channels, including email, call, chat, TikTok, Facebook, Telegram, and WhatsApp.

“We started working with a men’s health supplement company called Sperm Worms by the former founder of YC, who had a lot of tickets backlogged. His team were customer service agents in the Philippines, and they couldn’t clear the tickets efficiently. We took over on Thursday morning, and by Thursday afternoon, we had cleared the tickets from all channels like social media, SMS, email, chat, and voice,” Schnejans said.

The company currently employs six people, all of whom take turns to be available around the clock to the clients they work with. The startup said that, through the new funding, it aims to increase the number of employees in the next six months.

14.ai only works with AI engineers and plans to hire more AI engineers. The startup is learning the workflow of customer support and other functions, such as sales and revenue growth, and is trying to automate tasks through its software so that humans have to spend less time on certain issues.

“We’re not just a support agency, but we’re also a revenue growth engine because we pick up all kinds of conversations early on for the customer and get insights from them,” Pfister said.

The company wants to remove three key items from the startup’s balance sheet, including ticketing systems, AI software add-ons, and human labor costs. The startup caters to multiple clients in different sectors such as luxury skincare brand Yon-KA, smart glasses maker Brilliant Labs, and lighting company Creative Lighting.

The startup also wants to improve its own product through experimentation and letting AI handle most tasks. For this reason, it runs GloGlo, a brand of glucose gum for type 1 diabetics, and is trying to work autonomously using artificial intelligence.

Tom Bloomfield, partner at Y Combinator, believes 14.ai strikes the right balance between using AI and humans for customer service. With the right integration, AI can solve 60% of the task automatically, and humans can handle the remaining 40%, he said.

“As AI takes over more and more work, the balance between AI and humans will change over time,” he told TechCrunch via email. “And with current platforms, the client is left to deal with round after round of painful staff reductions.”

“In turn, 14.ai becomes the customer service department, both AI and human. They can reassign customer support agents between customers who are at different stages of their AI adoption journey, and implement load balancing more effectively,” he added.

Notably, AI-powered agencies are one of the things Y-Combinator mentioned in its applications for startups in 2026.