Crescendo AI: The $500M startup reinventing customer service with AI 🚀

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Hi 👋, this is the Today in AI Newsletter: The weekly newsletter bringing you one step closer to building your own startup.

We analyze a cool, industry-shaping AI startup every week, with a full breakdown of what they do, how they make money, how much they’ve raised, and the opportunity ahead. 

Let’s get to the good stuff in this email: 

• 💨This startup helps businesses fully automate their customer service

• 🚀 They’ve already hit $91M ARR, only 15 months from launch

• 💰 They’ve raised a $50M Series C at a $500M valuation led by General Catalyst

So what’s the startup and who are the founders behind it? Here’s the story of Crescendo AI 📈

Crescendo AI was founded by Andy Lee, Anand Chandrasekaran, Matt Price and Dr. Slava Zhakov in 2023 with the mission to rebuild customer service with generative AI.

There’s a long-standing issue in the contact center industry where “the unit of value is labor”.

This model often leads to inconsistent quality and a lack of alignment between businesses and their customers’ desired outcomes.

Crescendo provides businesses with outsourced management of their customer service and contact center operations using AI. 🤖

They use existing LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude to power their tools, building innovation layers optimizing for customer service on top. 🚀

The Opportunity 🤑

The contact center industry is massive:

• 📞 Valued at $460B in 2022, expected to hit $741B by 2030

• 📞 Contact centers account for 34% of the service market and 15% of all white-collar jobs in the U.S.

• 📞 Philippines and India dominate with 12% and 15% market share respectively

Yet, despite this scale, innovation has been lacking: